Media Release

October 27 2009

Environmental skills shortage a whole new ball game in HR

Businesses are feeling the pressure to adopt environmentally friendly workplaces Employers will soon be facing a difficult but very important skills shortage: finding people with the skills to build green workplaces, according to UniSA’s Centre for Human Resource Management researcher Dr Gerry Treuren.

Dr Treuren will tell a seminar being held at UniSA next week that responding to climate change will create a whole new ball game for HR practitioners.

Dr Treuren said evidence of the damage resulting from climate change was accumulating and businesses were feeling the pressure to adopt environmentally friendly workplace practices. These pressures would create four distinct types of skill shortages.

“First, there will be an enormous demand for research and development of environmentally friendly technologies,” he said.

“The world will need a generation of scientists, engineers, policy makers and managers trained to find better ways of doing things: processing and using coal in cleaner ways, harvesting solar and geothermal energy, and developing sustainable agriculture.

“Second, organisations and businesses will start the process of dismantling old, inefficient technologies and replacing them with new, environmentally-friendly approaches. Business will need people with the right knowledge to implement and maintain new environmentally-efficient business practices.

“Third, Australia’s expertise in some areas of climate-change management, such as renewable energy research and water management will be in great demand globally. This will increase international competition for our climate change-savvy Australian workers – a workforce already too few in number to meet local needs.”

Dr Treuren said these three shortages were workforce planning problems which needed to be faced by the business, government and education sectors working together to develop knowledge and skills needed for the future.

“There will be a fourth type of skill shortage: a shortage of HR expertise in the management of organisational change and workforce retention,” he said.

Dr Treuren and several other speakers will discuss the HR challenges of climate change at the Australian Human Resource Institute’s Young Professionals Forum on Wednesday 4 November at 5.45pm at the Bradley Forum, UniSA City West Campus. Go to www.unisa.edu.au/chrm for details.