Vocational education and training (VET) is key to ensuring that both young people entering employment and adult workers have the skills to contribute to and fully benefit from the green transition. ‘Greening’ VET encompasses a wide range of technical and craft skills that are crucial to reaching our climate and environmental objectives, such as installing renewable energy systems. Crucially, VET for the green transition also promotes broader environmental awareness. This helps learners to understand the broader purpose of climate goals; and the key role of technical skills in reaching these. These efforts pertain to VET at all levels of the European Qualifications Framework, both in more formal educational settings and less formal settings linked to the workplace. Further, VET has a key role to play not just in newly emerging activities that are key to green innovation and competitiveness. VET also addresses skills bottlenecks in more ‘traditional’ industries, including ways to make resource use more sustainable in such activities. In short, the green transition has consequences for skills – and thus for VET – across all sectors and occupations.
