Op-ed by Karen Cripps, Associate Professor in Responsible Management and Leadership at Oxford Brookes University Business School, and Candy Ho, Chancellor’s Chair and Educational Studies Faculty at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada – co-editors of a new book, An Organisational Guide to Skills for Green Workforce Transformation.
“Every job is a climate job” traces back to a 2021 TEDx talk by Jamie Beck Alexander, then director of Drawdown Labs at Project Drawdown, calling for every part of the workforce to join climate action. The phrase spread quickly and raises the question of which skills we need to harness and how to develop them.
An Organisational Guide to Skills for Green Workforce Transformation is written by industry leaders, for industry leaders, shaped around the language of transferable and transformative skills to enable a green transition.
A foreword from Aiyana Bodi of Project Drawdown and Drew Wilkinson of the Climate Leadership Collective introduces Project Drawdown’s Drawdown-Aligned Business Framework.
The framework identifies eight ways a company can act on climate, with only one of them — emissions reduction — being what most people would call a technical green skill. The other seven, from stakeholder engagement to policy advocacy to long-term thinking, depend on skills and capabilities such as communication, collaboration, systems thinking, coalition-building and reflexivity.
By harnessing and intentionally developing transferable and transformative skills across all levels and functions of organisations, climate action scales as employees leverage existing expertise. This lifts sustainability out of its silo, supports specialist teams, and enables workforce engagement in approaching climate action as much a human behavioural challenge as a technical one.
Technical skills are vital, but the transferable and transformative skills that are needed alongside them must not be overlooked or undervalued.
Structured around Project Drawdown’s eight leverage points
We built the book directly onto Project Drawdown’s framework: 18 chapters and seven case studies from 45 authors across 15 countries, organised into the eight sections. Each chapter illustrates the practical applicability of transferable and transformative skills through authors’ lived experiences of developing them. The authors come from 17 organisations, ranging from professional associations and multinationals to community enterprises and non-governmental organisations.
It is striking how readily diverse authors converged on the same terminology around transferable and transformative skills. In Section 1 (Emissions Reduction), Energyz Black’s Edwin Ehiorobo shows systems thinking and coalition-building carrying rural mini-grids through to digital grid tools.
In Section 2 (Stakeholder Engagement and Collaboration), Toluna’s Jonathan Arthurs describes ESG work that fails the moment it’s treated as, in his words, a “one-off tick-box exercise” rather than continuous engagement drawing on skills such as adaptability.
In Section 3 (Products, Partnerships and Procurement), Germany’s regional Chambers of Commerce embed systems thinking into apprenticeships, having apprentices identify energy-efficiency opportunities at their own employer. And in Section 4 (Investments and Financing), Danske Bank’s sustainability team shows Nordic financial advisors using collaborative thinking and a growth mindset to turn climate alignment into an actual client conversation.
Move further into the framework, and the pattern doesn’t change. In Section 5 (Climate Disclosure), Arpit Sharma of India’s Skill Council for Green Jobs maps transferable and transformative skills directly against disclosure job roles, arguing reporting requires far more than technical competence.
In Section 6 (Climate Policy Advocacy), the non-profit ClimateVoice describes employee coalition-building reshaping corporate climate policy from inside the organisation, not outside it.
In Section 7 (Business Model Transformation), the Chartered Management Institute’s David Jones frames management itself as the transferable skill that translates net-zero commitment into operational reality.
And in Section 8 (Long-term Thinking), Holly Alpine’s Enabled Emissions Campaign case turns to a less comfortable role for skills in confronting AI’s acceleration of fossil fuel extraction through systems thinking, ethical leadership, and advocacy.
For the leaders we have, and the ones we’re training
The book makes it clear that organisations should treat transferable and transformative skills as strategic assets. This calls for embedding learning in everyday work through training tools such as scenario planning, cross-functional problem-solving, and structured reflection after real decisions. To build capability, performance and recognition systems need to reflect skills such as collaboration and systems thinking – as if they go unrewarded, they won’t be practised at the scale needed.
We built this book because we believe in the value of worked examples showing why these skills matter, to inform both organisational practice and the broader community of education, career guidance, and policy ecosystems. Together, our global authors show why these skills matter and the benefits organisations gain by intentionally building transformative capabilities.
An Organisational Guide to Skills for Green Workforce Transformation (ISBN: 9781041090120) is available now in hardback and eBook formats from Routledge and other major booksellers. A 20% discount is available when ordered directly through Routledge using code 26AFLY2.
A virtual launch event takes place on 30 September, hosted by the UN PRME Working Group on Responsible Work and Purposeful Careers – register here.
