Skills as Strategic Infrastructure: Building Scotland’s Workforce for Net Zero

Across the Joining the Dots series, the common themes of complexity and fragmentation in the policy landscapes raises its head time and time again. For the skills policy environment, it is no different. In fact, it could be suggested that as we accelerate towards net zero, grapple with housing pressures, and seek to build climate resilient, thriving places – an available, skilled, adaptable and engaged workforce is not only critical but foundational to success. Practitioners across Scotland are already feeling the pressure to deliver retrofit, low carbon housing, resilient infrastructure and heritage-sensitive upgrades at pace.  However, across policy areas, skills are too often treated as operational details rather than strategic enablers. 

Yet, recent sector reviews and discussion papers frames skills as central to our net zero, housing, infrastructure, heritage, planning and placemaking ambitions, urging coordinated action across all policy landscapes to avoid leaving communities behind – stressing that skills are not an add-on but a delivery mechanism for policy goals – to be resilient and sustain growth in the future – an available, skilled, adaptable and engaged workforce is critical.  

It will always be a challenge to ensure that qualifications are current and relevant to the evolving workplace. Skills requirements within occupations change faster than the pace of standards development, qualification design, and processes to agree funding. However, it is crucial that we see these signals as an opportunity to translate such indicators into co-ordinated investment, procurement reform and regional scalable training that secures Scotland’s built environment for the long term i.e. accelerate Net Zero, improve housing quality and deliver a fair Just Transition.  

So, how do skills connect to policy objectives? 

Scotland’s built environment ambitions depend on a workforce equipped with retrofit, low carbon, and heritage–sensitive skills, allied to the need to develop digital skills to meet future challenges and support decarbonisation targets.  

Net Zero delivery hinges on retrofit capacity, low-carbon materials knowledge and low-emission installation skills; without these, emissions targets and housing decarbonisation will stall. Housing construction needs contractors and professionals able to work either delivering urban and/or rural stock while meeting energy efficiency goals.  Infrastructure and climate resilience demand engineers and planners versed in resilient design and whole life carbon assessment.  

Built heritage requires conservation skills that can be reconciled with repair, maintenance, new build, decarbonisation and retrofit approaches without damaging historic fabric. Procurement and placemaking are levers to embed skills development through social value, community engagement and local supply chain requirements.  

Whilst these linkages have been well documented, the current skills policies landscape is “hamstrung” with multiple overlapping roles, funding models, and delivery mechanisms creating confusion for users and undermining system effectiveness. This has been shaped by decades of institutional change, constrained by devolution, and shifting governmental priorities. Add Scotland’s lack of a coherent national skills strategy, which has led to competing narratives, duplication of efforts, and a failure to establish clear accountability or shared measures of success.  Such a “wicked problem” requires innovative, cohesive systems thinking. 

We need to shine a light on the importance of skills policies that are both integrated and place-based. This means linking skills development with broader local strategies for job quality improvements, housing, transport, and innovation support.  Therefore, as a sector to address the apparent skills policy inertia, we need to aim to offer a more nuanced view of what works and what needs improvement. All of us need to be aware that each gap not only maps to a strategic objective but also presents windows of opportunity to translate recent skills policy signals and industry missions into coordinated investment, procurement reform, and regional scalable training that secures Scotland’s built environment for the long term.  

So, what are the key skills policy gaps and tensions? 

I believe there are six key gaps and tensions: 

• Insufficient cross–sector workforce planning: Siloed portfolios (housing, transport, heritage, infrastructure, etc.) miss opportunities for shared training hubs and transferable credentials. 

• Fragmented policy alignment and training pathways: Retrofit, planning, procurement, and skills strategies frequently operate in parallel rather than in an integrated way, creating delivery gaps and missed opportunities for scale. 

• Regional disconnects and insufficient training capacity: Disparities in institutional capacity, especially between urban and rural areas, hinder equitable access to the provision of high-quality skills and alignment with local needs, limiting local pipelines for craft apprenticeships and professional roles. 

• Procurement misalignment: Current commissioning models often favour short–term cost savings (lowest capital cost) over whole–life value or workforce development, undermining demand for skills. 

• Innovation skills shortfall: Uptake of offsite manufacture, Building Information Modelling and circular practices is constrained by digital and manufacturing skills gaps 

• Built Heritage marginalisation: Traditional skills are frequently viewed as niche, rather than mainstream and important contributors to net zero, placemaking, and economic resilience. 

Without concrete policy alignment across skills, procurement, planning, infrastructure, repair, and climate programs, the parallel ambitions of built environment decarbonisation, housing resilience, and regional planning cannot be met without coordinated action on skills. We must look to tackle these tensions from a first-principles-thinking perspective if we truly want to challenge the status quo.  

Strategic Opportunities 

To close that gap, I would like to offer policymakers and sector leaders 5 key actions to prioritise: 

• Undertake robust policy evaluations:  We have a diluted understanding of what and how well skills interventions work and of determining the most effective way to increase skills levels and reduce unemployment 

• Reform procurement and incentivise: Move to value–based procurement frameworks that explicitly reward provision of training, knowledge transfer, innovative approaches, and alignment with local needs (climate resilience, built heritage and circular economy, supply chain engagement, employment and skills outcomes) 

• Fund regional training hubs: Invest in place–based centres that can be replicated regionally to scale prioritising communities affected by the transition, and to mainstream new competencies, and link schools, colleges, and employers to create clear career pathways and retain talent locally.  

• Create a National Built Environment Skills Framework: Standardise cross–sector credentials and enable portability between construction and infrastructure roles.  Also look to introduce stackable industry recognised micro credentials that allow workers to upskill incrementally (e.g., retrofit installer → low carbon systems specialist). 

• Embed cross–sector governance: Establish a convening mechanism that brings together skills bodies, local authorities, and industry to align targets and funding. 

These are not new or groundbreaking opportunities, but they are foundational to a resilient, sustainable built environment sector.  

Final Thought 

We already have new innovative centres of practice in the pipeline, such as Lock 16 – Scotland’s Centre of Excellence for Canals & Traditional Skills, Retrofit Scotland and Highlands and Islands Skills centre of Excellence for Skills, Safety and Innovation. 

We cannot afford to rest, we must be bold, coordinate action now, through systemic strategic collaboration, innovation, and transformation, and turn the current skills policy landscape from a constraint into Scotland’s built environment’s competitive advantage.  Ultimately, we must treat Scotland’s skills policy as strategic infrastructure, to allow us to indeed convert gaps, opportunities and policy signals into coordinated meaningful action.

BACK