Discover student and staff views on green skills and sustainability in the workplace

On Wednesday, 18 June, The Open University and Open SU were excited to host a hackathon-style online event, with students and staff from the OU and other institutions. This event was in partnership with SOS-UK (Students Organising for Sustainability) who organise the Responsible Futures accreditation.  

We set out to collect student and staff thoughts around skills, behaviours and capabilities they would consider useful to be a 'green' citizen. This included in everyday life, as well as considering work or career goals.  

We were also particularly interested in thoughts around how to integrate sustainability and knowledge of climate risk and adaptation into higher education curricula, including teaching the development of sustainability and relevant behaviours and skills to students.  

We thank the students and staff for sharing their thoughts with us.

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Here are some selected ideas collected for each question:  

What green skills would make you more employable or give you an advantage in your current job? 

• Engaging with carbon literacy training (you can do this fully-funded as an OU student). 

• Participation in university, SU or society events (involvement in external opportunities looks great on a CV). 

• Creativity for problem-solving. 

• Green digital skills. 

• Data skills – understanding energy/carbon/environmental data and how to analyse it. 

• Critical thinking. 

• Risk mitigation. 

• Adaptation planning.  

• AI and technology skills. 

• Sustainable decision-making. 

• Change through design. 

• Campaign skills. 

• Patience, self-awareness, space for reflection, adaptability, being willing to share information and learn. 

• Project development and leadership. 

Are you considering a career in sustainability? What skills might you need? 

• Public speaking skills to deliver a message or presentation. 

• Carbon literacy. 

• Influencing and negotiating skills to challenge unsustainable practices or where there are opportunities to embed sustainability.  

• Project development. 

How could your university go about engaging students with green skills? How would you want to be taught this at your institution? 

• Initiatives to sign up to, outside of the curriculum. 

• Real-life case studies. 

• Make it real – provide ‘real’ briefs. 

• Success stories of students using green skills to develop their careers. 

• Making it relevant to disciplines. 

• Raising awareness of the employability benefits of having green skills. 

• Making it clear how green skills links to the subject, and how your knowledge of the subject will benefit from developing green skills. 

• Learning opportunities for students to meet up and share green skills, and hear about what your university is doing to develop sustainability. 

• Employability skills that include sustainability as a core learning outcome. 

• Frame what students are doing already in terms of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to implement sustainability into module material. 

• Environment and sustainability groups set up within all schools. 

• Building digital badges to demonstrate green skills and accreditations.  

• Insight into industries/sectors and what they actually do and how sustainability relates to that.  

• Liaising with wider teams in the institution – library, skills team, external relations, marketing – to see how you can work together to present sustainability and sustainable development to different kinds of students. Some students may prefer to read about sustainable development, while others may prefer a more practical approach – engaging with wider events (e.g. community student-led spaces).  

How do we build these into all subjects in the curriculum? 

• High-level champion-set programme standards and learning outcomes. 

• Help students recognise that work in many fields is driven by current societal issues, like the climate crisis. 

• Get students to think about big-picture questions. 

• Build links with external actors.  

• Teaching circular supply chain in economics. 

• Raising awareness of SDGs (sustainable development goals) in every subject. 

• Collaborating with student societies and introducing it ‘softly’ in the first year, followed by cementing values in the second and third year. 

• For courses with less of an apparent link to sustainability, exploring the values of organisations related to the sector often demonstrates alignment to sustainability and corporate social responsibility etc. This then overlaps with awareness of commercial awareness for career planning.  

• Collaboration with academics is key, with support from services like the careers team.  

• Link to corporate social responsibility and commercial awareness. 

• Raise awareness of how environmental friendliness supports employability.  

If you have any thoughts on how sustainability can be embedded in your module, we would love to hear from you. We need student voices to help us to work with the OU to integrate sustainability and green skills into all modules. Message us (using the address below) with any thoughts or insights you have into a module you have studied, and our Student Representatives can pass this on in their faculty meetings. 

oustudents-projects@open.ac.uk