As the UK ramps up sustainable building efforts, a developing skills gap in facilities management threatens progress. In this article, Sam Arje, senior energy consultant and EnCO practitioner at Team Energy, explains the sustainability skills gap, its impacts, and the need for targeted training – without which even the most advanced sustainable buildings risk underperforming.
The UK government has made bold commitments to building a ‘clean power army’ of skilled workers to tackle climate change and achieve its net zero target by 2050. This narrative dominates headlines and policy discussions, focusing primarily on renewable energy installation, retrofitting, and construction. And, in some ways, rightly so. These technologies are crucially needed, and will play a central role in helping the UK to reduce its emissions.
Yet, there’s a gap in the conversation. One that threatens to undermine vast sums of sustainable infrastructure development and put organisations’ economic sustainability at risk: the sustainability skills crisis in facilities management.
Given the scale and urgency of decarbonising the UK’s built environment sector, which accounts for roughly 40% of the nation’s total emissions, a lack of sustainability skills is more than just a minor operational hiccup for building managers. It’s a fundamental threat to the UK’s sustainability goals and organisations’ financial longevity and reputation.
Understanding the sustainability skills gap
Traditional facilities management has focused on reactive maintenance and compliance with health and safety regulations, among other tasks. It’s a challenging sector, and navigating it successfully takes a concerted effort from teams of engineers and managers with varied skills.
However, low-energy, low-carbon buildings – whether new or retrofitted – now set the agenda. Growing in their complexity and equipped with state-of-the-art technologies, they require a host of new skills to manage them.
For example, smart building technologies and internet of things (IoT) integration is a primary way in which new energy efficient buildings are managed. Their data feeds into sophisticated building management systems (BMS) that track performance metrics against KPIs, and which can use multiple data sources to optimise the performance of key assets like heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) and lighting systems.
These technologies are powerful, but it takes skill to manage and derive insight from them. And while building management technology has ramped up significantly, there hasn’t been a universal and corresponding increase in the skills of the facilities managers and their teams.
On top of this, there’s now a need to account for the cost and carbon savings achieved through sustainable buildings, to feed this back into organisational ESG goals. This demands a knowledge of carbon accounting among facilities teams, alongside the ability to track and reduce emissions. Ideally, this happens under a recognised framework, or an industry requirement like ESOS, but achieving compliance requires a deep understanding of the framework’s technicalities and requirements.
What’s at stake for businesses
The immediate consequence of a sustainability skills gap is that low-carbon and low-energy buildings will fall short of their specifications, and fail to deliver on their promise. The performance gap –between a building’s energy and emissions savings on paper versus in practice – is a recognised phenomenon. Several factors can contribute to this discrepancy, and one of them can be a deficiency in the skills within a facilities or buildings management team. Sophisticated technology and management systems lose effectiveness without people who understand them; the ability to interpret data, optimise settings, and respond to any anomalies in performance.
The financial stakes are high too. Building new energy efficient buildings, or retrofitting existing ones with sustainable technologies, can cost vast sums of money. Suboptimal performance represents a significant waste of investment. It’s also an opportunity cost, reducing the energy (and therefore cost) savings that smart building tech can deliver. In this age of carbon accounting, there’s a further risk of underperforming with regards to Scope 1 and 2 emissions, or missing the Scope 3 expectations of customers.
Sustainability skills gaps can have ripple effects throughout an organisation. Elsewhere I’ve talked about how it’s important for companies to have a top-to-bottom approach to developing their energy efficiency skills. As teams move forward together, everyone benefits. However, if having a sustainability skills gap leads to buildings performing poorly in terms of their energy efficiency and emissions, it affects more than just those buildings. It can undermine the confidence in an organisation’s clean, low-carbon technology adoption. In short, high-profile underperformance encourages doubt and scepticism.
On one hand, the skills gap is here and now. There simply aren’t enough people with the right knowledge to deal with the slew of requirements, standards and new technologies that sustainable buildings must embrace. However, looking to the horizon, the consequences of inaction could become worse. This is why organisations across the UK need to ask themselves, what will our buildings be like in the next 10-15 years? They need to deal with the now, and the future.
Training is the way
The surest way to bridge the skills gap in sustainable building management is through training and support. And working with an energy efficiency trainer and sustainability consultant is an ideal way to do this. Energy efficiency training equips building users with new knowledge and skills to reduce energy consumption, waste and cost by making changes to their behaviour. It can be rolled out organisation-wide, or in bespoke scenarios it can be tailored to the needs of energy and facilities managers.
On top of this, working with a carbon reduction consultant can help set a foundation on which carbon accounting and reporting can be based, while facilities managers get up to speed through a multi-layered approach to training. This could include online learning, building management certifications, and hands-on technical training using the right software.
Ultimately, without skilled operators who understand complex sustainable systems, even the most impressive buildings will fail to deliver on their environmental and economic promises.
