The People Problem at the Heart of The Green Transition
Richard and Fiona
March 2026
The People Problem at the Heart of The Green Transition
Featuring: Fiona Howarth in conversation with Richard Tyrie, CEO & Co-Founder of Good People
The transition will not be built by technology aloneWe tend to talk about the green transition as a technological challenge: electrification, hydrogen, grids, carbon removal. But beneath all of it sits something more fundamental: people.
In this Earth Set podcast episode, Fiona Howarth sits down with Richard Tyrie to explore what happens when the labour market fails to keep up, and what it would take to fix it. The scale alone is sobering.
“We need four million workers reskilled by 2030, but the people who most need the jobs are the least likely to know how to access them.”
That single point reframes the issue. This is a question of how the entire system connects, not simply about training more people.
A labour market out of sync
At a headline level, the numbers are familiar. The UK will need around 4 million workers reskilled by 2030, including roughly 1 million entirely new roles. What is less well understood is why the system is not adjusting. Employers report persistent shortages. Workers struggle to access opportunities. Education providers sit in between, structurally unable to respond at the pace required. This is not a temporary lag. It reflects deeper misalignment.
The world of work is changing quickly, driven by decarbonisation, digitisation, and shifting industrial strategy, while the institutions designed to support it remain slow, constrained, and often incentivised towards stability rather than responsiveness. Further education, in particular, was not built for rapid iteration. As Richard notes, meaningful innovation within these systems can feel almost counter-cultural.
The result is a widening gap between what is taught and what is needed.
The fragmentation problem
If there is a single idea that anchors this conversation, it is this: “This is a fragmentation challenge.”
Large-scale decarbonisation projects are rarely delivered by a single entity. Instead, they are executed through layered supply chains: a prime contractor at the top, and beneath it a dense network of SMEs and micro-businesses carrying out most of the work. Each of these firms has a skills need. But those needs are small, localised, and disconnected from one another. Individually, they are almost invisible to the training system. Collectively, they are enormous.
A college cannot design a course for one firm hiring two people. But if hundreds of firms each need a handful of workers, a viable programme emerges. The problem is that this aggregation rarely happens. and demand remains siloed. And so without a clear signal, supply cannot respond. The skills are available, but the system cannot see them clearly enough to act.
Rethinking what counts as a green job
A second blind spot lies in how we define green work. The dominant narrative still focuses on what Tyrie describes as “dark green” roles — those directly tied to climate technologies. Engineers, installers, scientists. But much of the transition will depend on what might be called adjacent or “light green” skills.
The example he offers is deliberately unglamorous: scaffolders. Without scaffolders, there is no retrofit. No solar installation. No external wall insulation. In London alone, the labour required to decarbonise housing runs into hundreds of thousands of labour-years. And yet scaffolders are rarely considered part of the green workforce.
This matters because definitions shape behaviour. If we misunderstand what the transition requires, we misdirect training, investment, and policy attention. The transition is not just about creating new jobs. It is about reinterpreting existing ones.
A systems problem, not a market failure
At first glance, this looks like a classic supply-demand imbalance, but Richard suggests something more structural. In a functioning market, rising demand should lead to higher wages, more training provision, and new entrants. That feedback loop is weak here.
The reason is fragmentation. The “market” is not operating as a single system, but as thousands of disconnected micro-markets, each too small to shape outcomes. Layer onto this a collapse in career guidance as schools are increasingly under-resourced in this area, and the result is a generation of young people who want to engage with climate, but have little visibility of how.
Only a minority are even familiar with the concept of “green jobs”.
The shift towards business-led solutions
One of the more interesting dynamics in the UK context is the role of social value. Procurement frameworks are increasingly requiring companies to demonstrate tangible community impact, including employment, skills, and local engagement. This is beginning to shift incentives.
Workforce development is no longer purely a public sector concern, it is also becoming a commercial one. Businesses that can demonstrate credible pathways into jobs, especially for local communities, are gaining a competitive edge. Those that cannot face growing pressure.
At the same time, the public sector itself is stretched. The result is an important transition which is that business is being drawn into the role of system-builder. Not out of philanthropy, but because the system no longer functions without it.
From pipelines to systems
A direction of travel emerged from the conversation: we need better ways of aggregating demand. Stronger connections between employers and educators. Earlier and clearer signalling into schools. But we also need to think in terms of place.
Skills demand is geographically specific, tied to local industries and infrastructure projects. As authority over skills becomes more devolved, regions and cities are likely to play a more decisive role in shaping outcomes.
There is no single “green jobs strategy”. There are many, and they will look different in Manchester, London, or Teesside.
The deeper opportunity
If the system can be made to work, the implications are far broader than climate alone. This is a chance to connect people to meaningful work, to reduce inequality, and to rebuild local economies around the industries of the future.
“If we can get organised, we can tackle not just the skills gap, but also poverty and inequality.”
That is a far more expansive vision of what the transition could achieve.
Final thought
We often describe the green transition as a technological revolution, but in practice, it may be closer to an organisational one.
The tools exist. The capital is (largely) mobilising. The policy direction is set. But what remains unresolved is coordination: across labour markets, education systems, and supply chains.
Until that is addressed, progress will continue to fall short of potential.
🎧 The full conversation is available now as Episode 7, Series 2 of the Earth Set Podcast:
The People Problem at the Heart of The Green Transition
