Green Skills

Our education programme

UK-GBC’s training and education programme was founded in 2009 in response to industry demand for:

• Greater leadership, clarity, and cohesion to the sustainability training and education agenda
• A mechanism to enable built environment professionals to navigate easily to high quality education
• An accreditation framework for a UK-GBC professional qualification (e.g. ‘Sustainability Associate’)

Why this a priority for us

The Government has outlined its vision for 'Enabling the Transition to a Green Economy'. This transition requires a workforce with the right skills, attitude and behaviour - as further outlined in the governments report - Skills for a Green Economy.

Training and education are widely accepted as a necessary facilitator for change to occur. It is therefore imperative that the built environment sector gears up for this change, and equips industry with the skills, knowledge and behaviour required to deliver a sustainable built environment.

This includes not only skills in the low carbon and environmental goods and services sector, but also those needed to help all businesses use natural resources efficiently and sustainably and to be resilient to climate change.

Through our diverse education programme we aim to build the capacity of professionals in the built environment sector in the following ways:

•    Encourage leadership on green issues
•    Enhance knowledge about sustainability across the board
•    Facilitate multi-disciplinary collaboration
•    Help organisations future-proof their business
•    Foster a perspective based around systems-thinking

Understanding industry needs

The ongoing development of our education programme is informed by our close links with industry and their evolving requirements for training and education.

The programme was launched in 2009 after industry wide research confirmed a clear demand for UK-GBC to enter this marketplace. The initial courses were launched as a result of our first educational task group.

In 2011 a second phase of research was conducted to take a fresh look at industry and assess the potential to expand the programme. The findings confirmed a clear demand for high quality, accredited, multi-disciplinary sustainability training at every professional level. Through this research and work of a second industry task group, the Green Building Series was conceived and developed.

The findings from both phases of research can be found below:  

Phase 1 - Executive Summary 2009
Phase 2 - Executive Summary 2011