Giving the Trades a Fresh New Look: AI’s Role in Building Green Skills

We need the trades back, front and foremost in our national consciousness, and with a fresh new look. AI can’t fix your roof yet, and it may never make sense to ask it to. But AI can make sure that someone is available to go up on a roof, they bring the right tools and materials, they do the right things when up there, and they know how to do them.

Last week there was a fascinating livestream by FE News, Future skills – Green and Sustainability solutions.

Here are the themes I took away:

1. Most school leavers feel they don’t have the skills they need for the modern workplace.
2. To reduce carbon emissions, the #1 need is for retrofit skills, but many other green skills are also required, and generally skills are increasing far too slowly.
3. Green construction work is evolution not revolution, but it involves interdisciplinary combinations of skills and some non-traditional roles, so learning provision needs to adjust accordingly.
4. Low pay for teaching work means it is hard to recruit teachers, especially those with up-to-date skills, and it may be necessary to increase use of bitesize, specialist guidance such as masterclasses.
5. Not everything can be taught via classroom learning so on the job training is vital, but they are too separated at the moment, we need to increase collaboration between learning providers and employers.
6. It is vital to ensure that local communities benefit from funds allocated to green transformation, for example through creation of manufacturing jobs.
7. Young people who are concerned about the environment and want to make a difference may not even consider going into the trades, but the opportunities are huge. Trades are booming, well-paid, intellectually challenging, enjoyable, and no longer as male-dominated.
8. AI could really help.

In a nutshell, we need the trades back, front and foremost in our national consciousness, and with a fresh new look. It is exactly this that drives emerging AI products that empower the transition to green skills. AI can’t fix your roof yet, and it may never make sense to ask it to. But AI can make sure that someone is available to go up on a roof, they bring the right tools and materials, they do the right things when up there, and they know how to do them.

As the podcast speakers observed, we do have green technologies. What we don’t have is a workforce able to implement them. This is not a green skills challenge; it is a green skills crisis. To green our society, we need to scale up our skill base and do it fast.

The UK government knows this and aims to create 2 million green jobs by 2030. This will be particularly challenging in construction, where the average age is over 50, and generally, we are only creating a small fraction of the target jobs at the moment. A key problem is perception, how many people even know what a green job is? Or want to go into the trades, traditionally (and now quite wrongly) perceived as working class and low paid?

At the same time, people need new forms of work. Up to 8 million jobs could be lost to AI. What will take their place? People of all ages want a meaningful working life, not only financial rewards. Green skills can provide both. Looked at in this light, our green skills crisis can be seen as a green skills opportunity.

Any solution to this must be systemic, which is why a three-pronged approach is needed,

First, we must retrain existing professionals on the job, for free, without disrupting their work:

Second, we must help people transition from jobs threatened by AI by showing a comparable career path, helping create a personal transition pathway, and connecting them with local employers:

Third, we must bring young people into green professions, help Further Education colleges and other trainer providers up their game, ensure their learning material is current, and cater for emerging non-traditional careers by allowing flexible learning combinations. AI can help FE colleges and private learning providers transform their learning materials into bitesize chunks, available online, that teachers can help students mix and match into the non-traditional combinations required for a new economy.

Such AI products are needed to help communities become what I call Supercommunities. These communities respond to external challenges (climate, economy, inequality, wellness, even conflict) by restructuring to make new use of their capitals and assets. In this way, they can emerge from change stronger than before. This is more than resilience. This is antifragility.

In particular, new AI products, such as those described above, can help learning providers collaborate with businesses and benefit local communities by incorporating information like product or service catalogues and job vacancies. Organisations who provide this data become key stakeholders in the model I call Organisation-as-a-Platform, the platform being the Supercommunities vision of an Internet of Communities. This technology infrastructure gives control of data back to communities, allowing them to use the commitments made by individuals and organisations to build trust and empower further progress.

AI can empower the transition to green skills, which in turn will build the UK’s green job capacity. Done right, this can simultaneously help communities become Supercommunities, give people back control of their data, and create a new form of economy based on commitments and trust.

By Keith Harrison-Broninski, CEO of Dedoctive (LinkedIn profile)