Environmental sustainability: an industry response

The eleven (11) Industry Skills Councils (ISCs) have prepared a response to the question of environmental sustainability: Environmental sustainability requires the design and provision of products and services that incorporate and promote waste minimisation and the efficient and effective use and reuse of resources.

The collective response, as well as individual responses from each ISC, are contained in the document below, produced as an E Zine, enabling you to read the report on-line. You can read create a PDF or print selected pages from the report.

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Role of ISCs
The role of the ISCs is to identify and respond to the skilling needs of their industries.  To achieve this, they must be well connected to their stakeholders, develop training packages that accurately reflect industry needs and provide leadership in workforce development that is based on the latest industry intelligence.
From this position, the ISCs have examined the current impacts of environmental sustainability on their industry sectors and implemented a range of initiatives to address current and emerging priorities. In addition, they have collectively developed a range of principles to ensure that their activities are well targeted and effective.

Environmental sustainability requires the design and provision of products and services that incorporate and promote waste minimisation and the efficient and effective use and reuse of resources The overall goal of achieving environmental sustainability incorporates a wide range of practices.  These include personal responsibility, analysis skills, for example product lifecycle analysis, transparency, including compliance auditing and reporting, conservation, and waste management. It requires a climate of innovation, collaboration and leadership. Ultimately, it must support the deployment of technologies and work practices and build Australia’s workforce capacity to achieve environmentally sustainable outcomes.  In order to achieve this, the ISCs propose three essential guiding principles to underpin all VET activity.

1. Industry specific - Environmental sustainability must be approached in a manner that is specific to the needs of the job and the industry within which the employee works.  Skill needs will differ from industry to industry and job to job and must be addressed in a meaningful and relevant way to ensure the appropriate deployment of new technologies and work practices.

2. Appropriately timed - Environmental sustainability skill needs will emerge in an incremental way and at different rates from industry to industry.  The drivers for each industry are different and priorities for change will vary accordingly. Those sectors affected by compliance requirements will be primary instigators for new developments in technology and work practices.

3. Adds value - Workforce skill requirements to support environmental sustainability objectives must be carefully assessed to determine the need for new skills and the appropriateness of existing skills. It is important that skill development adds to workforce capacity in a meaningful way and does not add unnecessarily to the burden faced by enterprises in meeting the new focus of environmental sustainability.