An organisational guide to skills for green workforce transformation: for educators and students

As business schools seek to equip graduates for a rapidly changing world, the conversation around sustainability skills is evolving beyond specialist environmental knowledge. Increasingly, attention is turning to the transferable and transformative capabilities that enable individuals to lead change, foster collaboration and navigate complexity across all sectors and professions.

In this thoughtful reflection, Dr Karen Cripps, Associate Professor in Responsible Management and Leadership, explores the key insights from An Organisational Guide to Skills for Green Workforce Transformation. Drawing on contributions from practitioners and experts across the world, Karen considers how the book can support educators, students and institutions in embedding sustainability, employability and responsible leadership into learning and teaching. Her review offers valuable perspectives for those committed to advancing the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) and preparing learners for careers of purpose, impact and positive change.

by: Karen Cripps, PhD | Associate Professor in Responsible Management and Leadership

Since receiving my paperback, I have enjoyed the luxury of immersive reading, with the freedom to underline and scribble in the margins. Something about reading with a pen in hand has seeded deeper understanding and ideas. 

Book editors will appreciate the excitement of great content landing and the jigsaw of chapters coming together. Having received the paperback copies a few weeks ago, I have taken the last few weeks of summer to read it with fresh eyes, reading with the specific intention of how I can integrate it into my teaching this year - undergraduate, postgraduate and MBA. In this article, I share my thoughts on how educators and students can benefit from this book. 

What is the book about? 

The book comprises 22 chapters, plus an illuminative foreword, from over 45 authors, representing 15 countries and 17 organisations (from community enterprise through to multinational). Authors were tasked with writing about their experiences of transferable and transformative skills for a green transition - what skills matter, and how they can be developed, with a focus on practical recommendations.

The book is premised as an organisational guide to skills for green workforce transformation, rooted in the premise that "every job can be greened". This means every job role, across all levels and organisational types, can contribute in some way to climate, nature, biodiversity, and related global ambitions for a fair and just planet for all. Across the book, the message is that whether a specialist environmental/sustainability role or a non-specialist/generalist role, transferable and transformative skills matter.

In the foreword, Aiyana Bodi Bodi and Drew Wilkinson Drew Wilkinson state:

"Most people already possess the capabilities to integrate sustainability into their roles; the challenge is translating them into meaningful action across climate, biodiversity, water, and social justice"

By default, this shows how all modules, across all programmes, contribute to building the skills needed for workforce transformation. Our challenge in education is to enable and empower students to connect the dots across learning programmes and harness the opportunities of the green transition to build careers with impact, purpose, and meaning. 

Educators can catalyse change by supporting students to recognise, develop, and signal how the skills developed across all modules and programmes of learning are needed to drive sustainability action forward. 

The Framework 

Within higher education, many curricula are mapped to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) competencies. This book reflects these core frameworks through practitioner expertise - in their own voices. The chapters provide an evidence base for messages we may already discuss with students, but in written form. 

Many of the authors are senior professionals who share expertise from years of experience across sectors, as well as from leadership, coaching, and/or working with others. Collectively, the chapters focus not just on what matters, but on why and how to develop these skills.

The book sections are structured around Project Drawdown's (a leading US non-governmental organisation for science-based climate solutions) "drawdown-aligned business framework". The framework identifies eight key points of leverage, each covered in a book section:

1. Emissions Reductions

2. Stakeholder Engagement and Collaboration

3. Products, Partnerships and Procurement

4. Investments and Financing

5. Climate Disclosures

6. Climate Policy Advocacy

7. Business Model Transformation

8. Long-Term Thinking

Only one of the eight sections (emissions reduction) is what most people would consider a green skill in a technical sense; the others relate to transferable skills and transformative capacities. This terminology comes from a skills categorisation by UNICEF (2024), based on Kwauk and Casey (2022). 

A clear pattern holds up across the book's chapters, our authors return most often to collaboration, then leadership and communication, then systems thinking and adaptability - named independently by dozens of practitioners, from banking to biodiversity, with no coordination between them.

Relevance across disciplines

Educators and students can easily identify chapters by disciplinary areas such as marketing, finance, or supply chain management, and topics such as reporting, advocacy, or the circular economy. Within the chapters, it offers skill implications and recommendations in areas such as human resource management, ethics, leadership, and AI. Where chapters cover functional areas such as finance or supply chains, the broader relevance is explicit, for example, financial and investment decision-making for workforce pension plans or value chain relationship building.

Here is where each discipline sits in the book:

• Marketing - internal communication as a lever for organisational change; running an ESG strategy through communication, empathy and adaptability

• Finance - talking clients through a transition plan; cross-functional collaboration for nature-positive investment decisions; closing the skills gap in biodiversity-related financial risk

• Supply Chain & Operations - partnership-building across a real supply chain; operating amid informal supply chains and resource constraints; circular-economy operations and reuse

• Reporting - mapping the exact skills a climate disclosure role needs; navigating incomplete data and shifting regulation

• Strategy & Leadership - ISEP’s Sustainability Skills Map and cross-functional collaboration; management as the transferable skill that turns strategy into action; influence and internal advocacy as leadership skills

• HR & Workforce Development - apprenticeships as an SME upskilling model; mentorship and leadership pipelines; building confidence and capability across a whole workforce, not just its leaders

• Organisational Behaviour - coping with emotions and coalition-building amid change; national culture and long-term planning; cultural traits as a starting point for climate leadership

• Economics & Public Policy - village-owned enterprises and inclusive economic planning; business resilience under disruption

• Business Ethics - a first-hand account of surfacing a conflict between a company's climate commitments and its own AI commercial partnerships

This means that, regardless of the field of study, the book offers insight into workplace lived experiences and supports career readiness. In surfacing organisational enablers and blockers to action, readers gain critical insight into the organisational and national cultures that shape action amid a volatile and uncertain world.

The book is invaluable reading for educational and career professionals, and students/job seekers, offering a comprehensive volume of insider insights into employability skills. Global authors' discussion of skills in action makes it more applicable to readers beyond those interested in sustainability. It helps readers understand transferable and transformative skills likely to be sought in any talent recruitment process.

Enabling a social equity lens to understanding "green" responsible management and leadership means foregrounding transformative capacities based on traditional and indigenous wisdom - and showing their organisational applications, not just their cultural origin.

How to Use The Chapters

The chapters can be used for:

• Lecture content (visible connections can be identified through the 8 Project Drawdown book sections)

• Case studies for seminar discussion (e.g. section 8 case studies on long-term thinking across cultures and sectors)

• Activity suggestions shared for workplace training and workforce development (e.g. AI assumption testing, coalition building, mapping complexity)

• Module reading to supplement theory and concepts through sharing the voices of industry leaders

• Employability and professional development - illustrating how assessed skills such as reflexivity and critical problem-solving truly apply in a workplace context

• Enabling a social equity lens to understanding "green" responsible management and leadership, including foregrounding transformative capacities based on traditional and indigenous wisdom - showing the organisational applications

In re-reading the book, I see increasing commonality between higher education and workplaces in learning approaches. For example, the importance of interdisciplinary learning within higher education is mirrored by a workplace focus on cross-functional team engagement. Experiential learning opportunities are shown to be just as important in workplace training based on "doing". Organisational contexts and constraints shape approaches to skills development, and they work best when intentionally cultivated and resourced. Workplace learning, like education, works well through action learning, stretch assignments and structured reflection - within a context of psychological safety.

Your call to action 

We are humbled by our authors' dedication to contributing to this work, with no financial gain for the time they invested. Transformational change for a green transition can only happen with more awareness of the role that we can all play, and the authors' contributions provide a practical roadmap. Now, we ask for support in sharing their messages. We would love to hear your thoughts too, to help us amplify what has resonated and how you have used the book.

An Organisational Guide to Skills for Green Workforce Transformation, edited by Karen Cripps and Candy Ho (何甜茵) Ho (ISBN: 9781041090120) is available now in hardback and eBook formats from Routledge and other major booksellers. You can get a 20% discount when you order directly from Routledge using code 26AFLY2. 

Add it to your module reading list, share it with your career services teams, or if you are a student - ask your programme leaders or library to order it. 

What’s next? 

BOOK LAUNCH 

A virtual launch event takes place on 30 September, hosted by the UN PRME Working Group on Responsible Work and Purposeful Careers - register here. This will feature authors sharing their practical recommendations - a great chance to learn about the book and meet the authors. 

QAA - stay tuned for updates

The funded Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) Collaborative Enhancement project ‘Green Skills for Green Jobs’ report and launch event will be shared soon.  This develops the Project Drawdown framework and draws on the technical/transferable/transformative skills distinction, sharing insights from educators, students, and employers through collaborative workshops and multiple case studies of good practice across higher education.