Green Skills — the empty question in the Net Zero transition — for founders and VCs

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ufi-ventures

5 min readMay 17, 2023

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If our packaging will soon be made from seaweed[1], and we’ll all be using heat pumps to warm our homes[2] — where is the training to roll out these (and other) Net Zero solutions at scale?

In the past quarter, $11.2bn worth of venture investment went into climate tech companies, and there is projected to be a total of $36bn invested by the end of the year.[3] This is going to create a lot of jobs and R&D. There are also many existing vacancies and jobs, as climate tech venture investment and the companies backed by it, have been growing exponentially. There was $70.1bn invested in 2022, compared with $1.9bn in 2012.

The question for me, as an investor focussed on skills for work, is if all these jobs are being created in new technologies/solutions, how are people getting trained to do these jobs? Where do these “green skills” come from?

(I would note, as we’ve explored in our VocTech Challenge Green Paper: Skills for an economy in Transition with the Learning and Work Institute[4], the term green skills doesn’t have a clear nor consistent definition. However given we’re starting from such a low level here, I’m going to use it as a good catch-all to encompass the various skills families I’ve alluded to: the roles needed to support the transition from a high-carbon to low-carbon economy. I think that soon (like with the old umbrella term “tech skills”) we’ll discuss the different green skills on a more granular basis.)

Currently we are seeing very few EdTech or Future of Work start-ups responding to this green skilling challenge. The start-ups I’ve seen mostly fall into three brackets, targeting different areas of the market:

Job boards with third-party training partnerships to colleges or teaching bodies, catering to the more mature end of the market (eg solar panel installation)
Sustainability awareness companies — ranging from those simply hosting webinars to those starting to look at workflow plugins
Data analytics and carbon reporting companies — with some form of educational aspects linked to insights from the data

They’re mostly very early stage.

There are a few exceptions — companies that don’t fall into these three brackets — who provide the training themselves in specific green skills. One example is VRAI[5] that delivers VR-based experiential training for offshore wind. There are also companies who really understand that they cannot gain greater market share without a better supply of trained professionals to deliver their product, such as Furbnow[6]. But these companies are currently focussed on their primary service or product and not on a secondary service of providing training… at least not for the time being.

Why is this? Why are founders not jumping at this gap in the market?

There are no obvious answers. One key theme is risk appetite- given green skills training is so new, there aren’t many tech companies with a track record in training for these skills or a recognisable market. Meaning companies are risk adverse to use external companies, despite the fact there are a lot of new and existing technologies out there. Currently, companies are mostly providing training in house or via “ex-employee” type consultants, rather than by external vocational technology (VocTech) companies. Another is the novelty of the technologies in a large part of this sector — providers would need to be extremely bespoke to train for emerging technologies such as for BioSep (ultrasonic tech to create biochemicals from wood)[7] or 44.01 (geological mineralisation of CO2)[8].

Perhaps if there were niche providers, they would likely be training all the companies in their space — and companies could worry that providers would be teaching their trade secrets to their competitors. Founders are thus relying on system automation and/or pre-programmed tools to pass along knowledge — so that employees don’t necessarily need the training to know how the systems work, they simply need to know how to spot bugs and when to ask an expert founder to step in.

Where the market is mature, we see outside learning providers rising to the challenge. For example, colleges creating courses, such as Basingstoke College of Technology’s electric vehicle training centre[9], that supply talent alongside companies’ in-house training. Our portfolio company Metaverse Learning recently launched curriculum-aligned training programmes in Heat Pumps, Solar PV and Solar Thermal.

There is public sector funding to target skills gaps, such as the £9.2m Home Decarbonisation Skills Training Competition that went to organisations like the BESA Academy[10]. But once organisations like BESA trains people, they will need to find them jobs — and if existing players like Indeed aren’t doing this, it’s an easy opportunity for a start-up to fill this gap.

There is significant opportunity also in the reskilling space, supporting existing workers to transfer their skills to a related sector — one example of this is in supporting oil and gas workers to move to renewable energy. However, to train efficiently at scale, we will need VocTech companies, alongside great colleges and educational institutions, to deliver the skills needed to move us from a carbon-intensive economy to a low carbon economy.

So what would it take for a larger company to source talent from a VocTech company — e.g a “greenskills bootcamp” (a CAPSLOCK[11] for green skills)? At what inflection point will employees of climate tech firms found start-ups to supply training to their old companies (who were previously training workers on the job)? When will start-ups begin developing clear training solutions as part of their existing Net Zero product or service, at an early stage? When will the opportunities, in roles with medium and high skills transferability, be taken up by new EdTech and VocTech companies? Instead of talking about “green skills”, when will we start talking about “plant based biotechnicians” and “retrofit assessors”?

Its an exciting challenge, and if you’re answering these questions, building a company in this space, and/or agree or disagree with my thoughts– get in touch on: ellasaid.woodhouse@ufi.co.uk.

To find out about Ufi Ventures visit ufi.co.uk/ventures.For information on the VocTech Challenge: Skills for an Economy in Transition, including our upcoming White Paper, visit ufi.co.uk/voctechchallenge

Green Skills — the empty question in the Net Zero transition — for founders and VCs

Written by Ellasaid Woodhouse