Supply chains are critical to helping the world achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, the World Economic Forum (WEF) highlights in a recent article. It stresses that the question should no longer be whether such organizations invest in sustainability, but rather how to ensure that workforces and upstream suppliers are prepared to drive sustainability initiatives forward.
While recent research from the World Economic Forum and Kearney shows 66% of surveyed business leaders prioritize sustainability credentials over price when selecting suppliers, 94% of companies say they lack the necessary people power to implement their environmental, social and governance (ESG) agendas effectively. To reach critical 2030 sustainable development targets, companies may need to train as many as 150 million people with sustainability skills.
Bridging this skills gap will be essential to transforming supply chains to be more inclusive and sustainable.
WEF highlights that bridging the gap requires a collective effort from all stakeholders, including governments, financial institutions, businesses and educational institutions. They can use three priorities to counter this growing divide:
1. Invest in reskilling and upskilling: This includes not only training workers in new technologies and sustainable practices, but also fostering an organizational culture that embraces sustainability and encourages innovation and collaboration.
2. Scale-up collaboration: The focus here should be on providing early-stage skills and industry-relevant training, while ensuring scalability of results that cannot be achieved with in-company training alone.
3. Enact a paradigm shift: In this new paradigm, sustainability and operational excellence would be more ingrained than ever before, with sustainability driving performance enhancements and financial returns.
To enable this shift, empowering employees and upstream suppliers with sustainability skills must be seen as a strategic business opportunity that generates long-term value for all actors in the value chain.
To close the skills gap and scale sustainability across the value chain, public-private collaborations should focus on reskilling current workers, upskilling suppliers and preparing future generations to meet the demands of a green economy.
For example, the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Advanced Manufacturing and Supply Chains has collaborated with UNIDO and the University of Cambridge on a series of industrial policy workshops. These events mapped workforce development needs from each sector, identifying the following needs:
5 priorities for the public sector
#1 Early-stage skills development
Building the needed talent pool begins with education and programmes that enable seamless transitions from K-12 to work
[Note: The K-12 system encompasses elementary, middle, and high school education, preparing students for either higher education or entering the workforce.]
#2 Integrated approach to technology and skills
Technological foresight exercises can be used to inform skills developents programming, ensuring that skilling strategies stay on pace with evolving technologies
#3 Balancing stability and reactivity
Regular public-private-academic communication ensures that training programmes remain aligned with evolving industry transitions, promoting a responsive and effective workforce.
#4 Safety nets
When reskilling and upskilling cannot fully help absorb displaced labour, temporary safety nets are key in giving vulnerable workers the support they need to transition to new occupations
#5 Establishing training requirements for large firms
Ensuring workers receive the support they need, governments can incentivize companies of a certain size to invest in worker training
3 priorities for organizations
#1 Proactively partnering on training curricula
Engaging with trainers and academics to develop proactive approaches, enabling real-time responses to current skills and anticipating future needs
#2 Lifelong learning
Establishing learning and training centres that support continuous learing opportunities internally can preserve pre-existing investments and institutional knowledge while allowing for employee growth.
#3 On-the job training and re-training
One of the best places for workers to learn new skills is on the job through ‘learning by doing‘
In a past video, ILO had highlighted that technological change, globalization, demographic trends and climate change will significantly shape skill needs for new and current jobs alike. When it comes to the maritime industry, global shipping’s green transition is expected to create new jobs and skills for hundreds of thousands of seafarers worldwide.
In that regard, many stakeholders have taken action to prepare existing and future workforce for a smooth transition. For example, in 2022, Maritime UK launched a new green skills project to help ensure that the maritime industries have the skills required to enable its decarbonisation. In 2023, the Maritime Just Transition Task Force announced the launch of a new training project will prepare seafarers for zero or near-zero emission ships. As Martha Selwyn from the Maritime Just Transition Task Force pointed out: ”In the next few years and while the STCW convention is still being reviewed, it will be particularly important for the Industry, as it relates to additional training for decarbonization, to invest in the reskilling or upskilling of staff according to their roles. Moving forward, industry will also play an important role in delivering and investing in ship-specific training to staff.”
In addition to the challenges of decarbonization, seafarer training and skills must also address the challenges posed by digitalization. In this regard, DNV has noted that workers will need to acquire creative and social skills to qualify for post-automation roles. Moreover, the significant changes brought about by technological transformation will need to be managed through effective communication and negotiation.
