Recent academic literature on green skills reveals a clear consensus: we need to dramatically expand our understanding of what constitutes "green skills" and how we develop them. While technical capabilities remain important, successful environmental education must encompass a much broader set of competencies to drive genuine sustainability transitions.

View eeRESEARCH Collection: Green Skills and Net Zero education

Three key themes emerge from recent research. First, green skills development must combine technical, interpersonal, and transformative capabilities. As Kwauk and Casey (2022) articulate, we need specific skills for green jobs, broader "green life skills" for sustainable behavior, and transformative skills that enable systemic change. This aligns with Fuchs's (2024) finding that effective sustainability education requires both operational abilities and the capacity to become active agents of change. For example, while a renewable energy technician needs technical expertise, they also require communication skills to work with communities and systems thinking to understand broader sustainability implications. Fuchs (2024) emphasizes that while short courses can address immediate technical needs, deeper transformation requires comprehensive, multi-year programs that combine classroom learning with workplace practice. These programs should build networks between educators, maintain dialogue with environmental stakeholders, and regularly evaluate whether skills are contributing to actual sustainability improvements.

Secondly, green skills development must explicitly address social justice and inclusion. McGrath and Powell argue that environmental education should promote both human development and environmental sustainability while actively reducing poverty and inequality. This perspective is reinforced by recent research on green reskilling of African women (Adeola et al., 2023), which identifies four crucial skill areas: natural asset management, climate resilience, resource efficiency, and low-carbon industry support. Their work demonstrates how environmental education can simultaneously address gender inequality and climate challenges when properly designed.

Thirdly, successful implementation of Green Skills and Net Zero education need to be carefully and collaboratively designed. Denmark's success in greening vocational education, as documented by Carstensen et al. (2024), demonstrates the importance of balancing stakeholder autonomy with coordinated support structures. Their "polycentric governance" approach gives real decision-making power to industry stakeholders while maintaining strong state support. This enabled their electrician and plumber training programs to rapidly adapt to emerging green skills needs while ensuring changes remained practical for employers. 

This collaborative approach is further illustrated by a compelling case study from Murley, Gandy, and Huss (2017), who documented how teacher candidates from Western Kentucky University completed field experiences at the nation's first net zero school—a facility generating as much energy as it consumes through renewable sources. The school features impressive sustainability elements: solar panels providing 75% energy reduction compared to typical schools, geothermal systems, and solar tubes piping natural light into classrooms. Beyond environmental benefits, the facility serves as a living laboratory for sustainability education.

The study revealed that while teachers expressed pride in the innovative facility and students demonstrated high awareness of sustainability concepts, there was a critical gap: despite the extraordinary learning environment, many lessons designed by teacher candidates engaged students only at lower levels of learning rather than promoting higher-order thinking skills. This highlights that successful implementation requires not just innovative facilities and technical knowledge, but also proper training for educators to maximize these resources by fostering critical thinking and systems understanding. The Danish experience and the net zero school case both show that successful implementation requires genuine collaboration between stakeholders, supported by mechanisms for continuous learning and adaptation. For environmental educators, the lesson is to think carefully about partners and program design, creating structures that support collaboration while developing the capacity to engage learners in deeper systems thinking.

As we face intensifying environmental challenges, expanding our approach to green skills development becomes increasingly crucial. The research clearly shows that simply training people for green jobs isn't enough – we need holistic approaches that combine technical training with broader personal development and systemic change capabilities. Success requires careful attention to program design, ensuring programs have both sufficient autonomy to adapt and enough support to maintain quality and inclusion.

The future of green skills development lies in creating educational experiences that empower learners to understand and transform the systems driving environmental challenges, while ensuring these transformations benefit rather than exclude vulnerable populations. By embracing this broader vision of green skills, we can better prepare people not just to work in a greener economy, but to actively contribute to creating more sustainable and equitable societies.