Some roles include mandatory reporting on carbon emission goals Photo: 123RF
A skills shortage is making it challenging for companies to meet sustainability reporting requirements, with most industry professionals wanting more training to keep up with the changing demands.
A report by Oxygen Consulting in collaboration with the Sustainable Business Council (SBC), Sustainable Business Network (SBN) and Auckland University of Technology (AUT), has picked up a number of issues around training and development of the workforce needed to support a growing industry with increasing challenges.
The report finds just 10 percent of working professionals believed their training and development covered the skills needed for their role, which also included mandatory reporting on carbon emission goals, for example.
More than half of the workforce (54 percent) thought professional training was needed to keep up with industry changes.
Oxygen Consulting director Sarah Holden said the challenge was increasing.
"With business sustainability moving beyond traditional operational efficiency, organisations are requiring more specialist knowledge around integrating sustainability within their governance processes, strategy, and core products and services," Holden said.
The survey data also indicates just a third (34 percent) of sustainability professionals felt completely competent in their current role this year, a drop from 41 percent in 2023.
SBC executive director Mike Burrell said the demand for sustainability professionals was increasing, which was a good problem to have, though the timing could have better.
"It's a shame that this is happening off of the back of Covid and then a recession, because I think if this was happening in more normal times, it wouldn't be an issue - we would just employ more people," Burrell said, adding the work-around was to build teams to address the workload.
"This is a team game. We've moved well beyond just having a single sustainability provision or even a small group of them in a large organisation.
"So we're seeing that with the major corporate that's exactly how they're operating now. They're using virtual sustainability teams to complement their specialist sustainability and I think it's a good thing."
However, Burrell said there was a need to ensure universities were turning out sustainability graduates capable of meeting a broad range of specialist skills, in addition to on-the-job training modules to keep the industry fresh and able to meet expectations.
He said AI was a feature of the changes sustainability professionals were dealing with, adding that training would need to be ongoing given the fast pace of change.