This webinar was part of the Career Industry Council of Australia's Green Careers and Sustainability Month Series in February 2023.

Starting point: greenification of education

Skills for a sustainable, green economy and society are for sure welcome. But what does this imply? Greenification and even more greenwashing are concepts which are used not just to approve green issues, but also to hint on the aspect, that a lot of measures promoted as for the environment are actually quite ambivalent in order to make our world greener, i.e. worthwhile to live also for future generations of human mankind.

Vocational education and training and green contents and skills

The critical appraisal about this “green wave” is expanded in this webinar to how it is affecting Vocational Education and Training (VET). A lot of firms and also education policy try indeed to be and to appear greener. The question is whether VET is helpful in “saving” the planet or at least if “sustainability”, as an educational aim, gives us a possibility to modify our behavior in the long run. But is sustainability really learnable? The webinar critically discusses the role of apprenticeship, and VET more in general, in this landscape and the potential role of apprentices as enablers of change.

For a lot of young people green issues are in their everyday life an issue. E.g. critical opinions related to economic growth and post-materialist values are a topic which is discussed in private and public lives.

Reform projects in apprenticeship-countries

In one of several pilot-projects in Germany the companies were encouraged to identify company-specific audit events and prepare and accompany the apprentices in the further course of the auditing, so that sustainability could be identified, and measures and skills experienced. The aim was to involve apprentices and to stress the participatory aspect of their roles in firms and schools opening up a new perspective in greening, which should be furthered even more systematically.

Prospects

Dual apprenticeship countries like Germany, Switzerland and Austria are not per se better in innovation related to green skills than other countries with a school-based vocational system. However, the combination of different learning sites is an advantage in promoting sustainability, and the potential is there, as long as firms are flexible and open for such challenges.

Presenter - Professor Philipp Gonon (Switzerland)