ORPHAN CHILD, INVISIBLE GORILLA, DUNG BEETLE …? THE POWER OF ENVIRONMENTAL SECTOR ASSOCIATIONS TO SAVE THE WORLD

C. Feeney (Environmental Communications Ltd and Environment & Sustainability Strategic Training Institute)

ABSTRACT

We’re in the throes of a decades-in-the-making shortage of the professional skills needed to deliver the nations’ construction, infrastructure and environmental goals. Water New Zealand and other environmental sector associations are doing their best to address this.

The necessary skills are all intertwined, but there is no overarching strategy to address them to avoid gaps or duplication of effort by the many players involved. ConCOVE, the Construction and infrastructure Centre of Vocational Excellence, funded a Phase 1 project to address this, with the first step being to assess the skills landscape across four core sector associations; Carbon and Energy Professionals (CEP), Civil Contractors New Zealand, WasteMINZ and Water New Zealand.

The project categorised the many government, business and not-for-profit players in the environmental space; analysed the skills comments in the four associations’ recent submissions on government initiatives; and identified key training initiatives planned and under way.

The results show that sector associations are an active and vital player in sustainability skills identification, prioritisation, development and delivery to practitioners. However, while professionals in the workforce vastly outnumber the student populations, their CPD (continuing professional development) needs are overlooked – yet their needs are the agile and essential precursor to well-informed tertiary education. The key finding was that despite the high value government bodies place on their input, the power of these associations to spearhead the development of vital and economically important skills goes unnoticed and untapped.

The amount of training already being done by overworked and under-resourced associations shows that a little money would go a long way towards enabling them to work together to deliver significantly more training. Phase 2 of the project is to prepare a business case for funding this.

This work adds to seminal thinking on industry training by business luminaries Michael Porter and Peter Senge; economic luminaries Lord Nicholas Stern and Joseph Stiglitz; and Martin Betts and Michael Rosemann on the massive disruption already affecting our tertiary learning institutions.

This is a call to action for Water New Zealand members to actively support their training programmes and help lift our profile as the place where environmental experts come together to make the biggest difference at the fastest speed.