What happened at 'The Green Skills Service Business Breakfast Briefing'?

Brydie Lund, Skills Associate and lead on The Green Skills Service at the West Yorkshire Consortium of Colleges

On Friday 24th February we held a business breakfast briefing at Hub26.2 in Cleckheaton. We had invited businesses in the region to come along, share a breakfast with us and find out how we could help them with their sustainability plans.

I began the morning with a presentation explaining The Green Skills Service and the benefits the service can offer to employers and plans to continue to grow the platform.

After, myself and WYCC colleagues sat with all the different businesses that attended and discussed their own journeys of incorporating green into their business. The honesty and enthusiasm from the businesses was great. I found it really interesting to hear about such a variety of challenges, but also the successes across different sectors, such as construction, digital, manufacturing and logistics.

I’m so proud that we were able to create a welcoming and safe environment for people to speak open and honestly about the areas their business needs further support.

In addition, it was really inspiring to hear some of the initiatives the businesses have already been doing. These included

• sustainability tracking,
• sustainably modifying their products, and
• setting up working groups within their sectors to share ideas, discuss the measures needed to improve their sector and the methods needed to meet the national net zero agenda.

The one consistent area in all the conversations was overwhelmingly the need for upskilling within ‘green’.

Regardless of the sector and distance travelled within each business’ journey, it was consistently mentioned that support with upskilling their workforce was needed, across all departments and levels to align with their sustainable polices or aspirations, but also to futureproof their company.

These skills consisted of

technical areas such as waste management, carbon measuring, lean practises, and,

behavioural areas including change management and climate awareness and terminology, such as carbon literacy.

So what next? We are currently arranging follow up discussions with every business who wanted to take their conversation further and begin to map the support we can offer them. We’ll be working on supporting them through the courses we currently have under The Green Skills Service, to developing courses the businesses would like to see. We’ll be providing useful resources and sharing their ideas and progress to support other businesses. We offer further sessions for companies to drop in and gain the support and information they need.

As lead of The Green Skills Service, I’m thrilled that our first breakfast briefing was a huge success. Based on the feedback we received, it is clear to me a lot of work still needs to be done through collaboration across our region, but like all the businesses who attended Friday’s event, we are prepared to take on the challenge!

Find out more about Green Skills (westyorkshirecolleges.co.uk) and get in touch for more information.

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