Alberta is managing fair-to-middling when it comes to developing a workforce with green capabilities.

The landmark study of the green-collar sector, published by Calgary-based ECO Canada in 2007, pegs it as representing 11.8 per cent of the province’s total employment. Dicing those numbers down to actual jobs is a bit more difficult, but the good news is they’re spread across virtually every sector, with mining, oil and gas being the single largest sector with 7,763 employees out of a total green-collar workforce of 62,461 people.

Still, the province has a long way to go to catch up with Ontario, where a whopping 42.5 per cent of the workforce is in some kind of green-collar job, or second-place B.C., with 17.6 per cent of its workforce in the green sector.

With interest among students strong, the province has a good shot at improving its capabilities.

Sarah Coffin, communications co-ordinator at the University of Alberta career counselling centre – CAPS: Your U of A Career Centre – says 269 students attended the university’s first green-careers forum in early 2009. Subsequent editions have attracted significantly fewer students, but the same broad cross-section of faculties was represented.

“The student groups that we worked with to organize these forums were all quite keen and all came from different faculties,” Coffin says. “The student attendance at the actual forums was just as broad and students came from different faculties across campus including arts, science and agriculture, life and environmental studies, and more.”

Grant Trump, founding president and CEO of ECO Canada, a Calgary-based organization that focuses on employment in the environmental sector, thinks post-secondary programs leading to green-collar careers have been popular. “We have seen good uptake within the university and colleges system of young people going into environmental careers,” says Trump.

The sector has been resilient in the face of the recent recession because federal and provincial governments have allocated a significant volume of stimulus funding to remediation projects requiring the expertise that programs are providing. There’s also growing interest among private companies in greening their operations.

“The opportunities for environmental employment, as we are natural resource-based economies, are large, and we are going to see the employment continue to grow because the population continues to grow, and as those demands increase, so will the demand for people with the appropriate environmental competencies,” says Trump. “Environment is by no means recessionary-proof, but it is a little more recessionary resistant because it’s regulatory driven.”

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Drawing from diversity

Globally, the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute expects annual expenditures on environmental goods and services to double by 2020, approaching US$2.75 billion.

The kinds of jobs fuelling that growth, especially in Alberta, will be diverse.

“I have personally always referred to green-collar jobs broadly as those that have a net benefit on the environment,” says Michael Dayan, chief officer, communications and strategy, at the Vancouver-based Green Collar Association. “These include the efforts of white-collar professionals such as lawyers and accountants, as well as blue-collar labourers such as electricians and plumbers.”

CAPS also includes farmers and farm-market vendors among the vocations that play a role in building the green economy, as well as restaurants serving organic food and eco-tourism enterprises.

“The possibilities for green jobs are virtually endless and they include more than energy, homes and building, infrastructure and food,” wrote Coffin in a 2009 article the career centre published in its fall 2009 magazine. “You can get involved in eco-tourism, start a green advertising business, open a retail store that specializes in local products, build furniture from recycled materials, become a green investment adviser, open a green hotel or become a green lawyer.”

A plan published in 2009 by the Alberta Federation of Labour in partnership with two well-known conservation groups, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, suggests that transforming Alberta’s economy into a greener creature through the development of high-speed rail connections and renewable energy sources could create between 85,000 and 140,000 jobs within five years.

Regardless of how realistic such a rapid investment of government cash is likely to be given competing priorities, it indicates key areas for growth.

Dayan echoes the report, identifying energy efficiency and renewable energy, as well as transit and high-speed rail line development among the opportunities for Alberta to create “tens of thousands of green jobs.”

“Both conventional gas production and conventional oil production have already peaked in Alberta and, as resources, both are in decline,” Dayan says. “In terms of long-term growth, tar sands output will not be matched by a proportional growth in jobs. ... All of this suggests it would be unwise for Alberta to maintain our over-reliance on the oil and gas sector as a generator of employment.”

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Certification objectives

Technology, management and communications skills will be among the most desired attributes employers will seek, Trump believes. But if these skills are transferrable from other industries, certification in the sustainable realm is also important.

While designations such as LEED-accredited professional have become popular in recent years, other programs exist such as the certified sustainable building adviser, a designation rooted in Natural Step principles. (Natural Step originated in Sweden in the late 1980s and became an approved strategy for sustainable development in that country in the early 1990s.)

Michael Duarte-Pedrosa, principal of Buffalo Jump Environmental Consulting in Blairmore, will debut the nine-month sustainable building adviser program in calgary in October 2010. the program has the endorsement of the Alberta Association of Architects as well as the Architectural Institute of B.C., both of which offer learning units to participating members.

“If you are trying to win a contract to be a subcontractor or provide some sort of service to that building project, it would behoove you to have some green building experience or a course like this under your belt to show that a) you’re committed to what the project is trying to achieve with respect to sustainability and b) that you’ve actually taken the time to become familiar with some of the design or some of the features that can be incorporated into a building to make it more sustainable,” Duarte-Pedrosa says. “This kind of training is essential to be successful in the building marketplace in the future.”

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Training and development

Overlaying such training on other skills may help set candidates apart, if the experience of James Furlong, principal of PCPL Buildings Engineering, a subsidiary of Stantec Consulting Ltd. in Calgary, is any indication. His firm is constantly looking for well-qualified people, but finding candidates with the right mix of skills is difficult.

“It is a high-demand field. What we struggle with, often, is that graduates come out, in my opinion, rather ill-equipped to work in that industry of sustainability because most post-secondary institutions are geared up for more traditional lines of work,” he says.

Most graduates he encounters haven’t been trained in skills such as energy modelling, for example, which helps identify opportunities to reducing energy use in structures. Similarly, architects often lack the knowledge of engineering principles and engineers lack the knowledge of architectural principles. The ignorance leaves both with a less comprehensive means of understanding projects.

“Oftentimes, we’re left looking for applicants with the pieces of education they need, and we have to take it upon ourselves to take that and hope for the best, that they’re going to like what they do and train them up from there,” Furlong says. “There’s just no school that’s singularly going to teach you to be a sustainable consultant and walk out with that knowledge.”

Ann-Lise Norman, director of the University of Calgary’s environmental science undergraduate program, says steps are being taken to address this. The environmental studies curriculum offers students exposure to six areas of study – biology, chemistry, physics, geology, geography and statistics – with a view to enabling students to research, understand and interpret data easily. The program accepts up to 40 new students each year, with 160 students participating at any one time.

“It’s a pretty good program that gives people an idea of the science behind environmental issues, primarily, but it also addresses that interface between the social sciences and the science,” Norman says. “They’re able to tackle environmental problems from a multidisciplinary perspective.”

The undergraduate studies can lead to professional training in the university’s environmental design program.

Some people opt for on-the-job experience.

Roger Bayley, whose eponymous West Vancouver engineering firm Roger Bayley Inc. is part of the redevelopment process for the municipal airport lands just north of Edmonton’s downtown core, regularly has people approaching him in the hope of acquiring some experience on a volunteer basis. He expects the tide of interest to keep rising as political will in Alberta and elsewhere lends a future to green career paths. The kinds of people required under the airport lands redevelopment strategy are examples.

“It is without doubt the most progressive, demanding set of statements from an urban planning bureaucracy that I have ever seen,” Bayley says. “And to meet the conditions laid out in that document will be quite extraordinary. All of these political commitments are going to begin to drive opportunities in environmental and sustainable community consulting and employment.” •

By Peter Mitham