Why Green Skills Are the New Job Currency with Neil Yeoh

Frank Cottle [00:00:00] Neil, welcome to the future work podcast. Really excited to have you here. Your expertise is without peer. You are the messenger of green. And I really want to pose a simple question. We’re going to talk about being green today and all the implications of it, but is green really the future of work?

Neil Yeoh [00:00:54] That is a great question. And I think that’s what we’re here to ask. Um, and maybe a good way that I can put this is I think, yes. Uh, if you think about it in today’s age, We’ve never experienced the worst of environmental impacts from the degradation of how we’ve been treating our world. So one killer statistic is currently we’re actually consuming 1.

7 earths, more than what the earth can replenish. And if you just think about it from a basic math standpoint, 30 percent of our world is made of land and we have more than 8 billion people. At some point in time, we’re going to run out of resources. So unless we are thinking green, the future of business is at strife.

Frank Cottle [00:01:36] : Well,  let’s define something. Yeah. When we talk about green, uh, green means different things to different people. Yes. Okay. Uh, my wife, green means vegetables for dinner. Uh, okay. And, and, um, we eat a lot of them. But, um, let’s really define what green means. And I know you’re going to talk about green skills also, which is part of the future of work question. Um, so define what green means. To you and in your use of it to our audience.

Neil Yeoh[00:02:12] : Yes, absolutely. I’m going to try my best to do this because we use a lot of jargon, as I would say in many different industries. So green skills, I’ll just jump straight to the chase. Green skills are competency. So your abilities or your knowledge to help an individual or an organization to implement environmental practices.So what do I mean by that is historically we’ve seen it. We know that solar and wind energy, we can relate to that, right? Is a different form of energy than perhaps burning fossil fuels. That is green and there are green skills involved in order to transition The way that we consume energy so that it is sustainable in practice, we can think about it in terms of reducing waste, conserving our resources, or even measuring these emissions that are actually creating global warming, which are changing our weather patterns.So green is a catch all phrase. And this is the frustrating thing I have about how to actually embed environmental and sustainable practices as an individual, but throughout the workforce.

Frank Cottle [00:03:15] : You know, one of the things that we’re bombarded with daily is data.

Neil Yeoh[00:03:20] : Mm

Frank Cottle [00:03:21] : hmm. We just use some. Oh, we’re consuming 1. 3 Earths annually. Really? I haven’t eaten any dirt lately, so I’m not sure about that. Um, but we’re bombarded with lots of data.

Neil Yeoh[00:03:33] : Mm hmm.

Frank Cottle [00:03:34] : And, uh, one of those data points is net zero.

Neil Yeoh[00:03:38] : Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:03:38] : Um, I’m in the UK, uh, I’m gonna be net zero by 2050. And here’s how we’re going to do it. We’re going to have all electric cars. Let’s take electric cars as an example. Um, electric cars are green. They’re greener. Yes. But they’re not really that green. It takes a lot of carbon fossil fuel to build an electric car. It takes a lot of mineral resources to build the batteries, et cetera. And when I, when I look at data, I always have to challenge it and say, are those numbers built into the net zero? Or are just the reduction in fossil fuel gasoline and diesel, in this case, that the car would otherwise have burned.

Neil Yeoh[00:04:29] : Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:04:29] : Booked into those numbers. And I kind of see it all over the place. Yeah. You know, what they say, I think Mark Twain said it best, about statistics. Lies, lies, and damned lies. Um, you know, how, how do we rectify this so we, if we believe in something, we know that we really can believe in it.

Neil Yeoh[00:04:50] : Yeah. 100%. Well, let’s take one step back because you used the word net zero, and for those that don’t know what net zero is, let’s take one step back. So the United Nations came up with the concept. That right now, greenhouse gases are getting emitted. There are carbon dioxide, there’s methanes from cow burps, industrial processes, all of which contribute to this blanket around our atmosphere. And the more that we’ve been, uh, emitting into the atmosphere through our industries, including fossil fuels and our industrial processes, it’s almost like putting on a thicker and thicker blanket. So we would get warmer and warmer and become very uncomfortable. So just like when we had. The ozone layer. So you remember when we had the hole in the ozone layer? I think many people might recall that

Frank Cottle [00:05:35] Frank Cottle: I couldn’t use hairspray anymore.

Neil Yeoh[00:05:38] : Well, and that’s actually a great point. It was, we realized it was a hole in the ozone layer. UV rays were coming down and giving people skin cancer. And so the United Nations said we need to make a very simple way for individuals and industry to close the ozone layer. And what they realized was That it was aerosols. It was refrigerants. It was things causing the ozone. So the pathway forward was to stop using aerosols. The same thing has happened with global warming. Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:06:05] : It has been effective.

Neil Yeoh[00:06:06] : A hundred percent. And it was effective because the solution was something we could all understand. And actually act on the problem with greenhouse gas emissions. And I talked to Seth Godin about this. He’s one of our advisors is if greenhouse gases were purple, we would have solved the problem yesterday. The problem is, is that these gases are invisible. And so we’re slowly experiencing the impact. So when the United nations came up with net zero, they were trying to come up with a way where. Individuals in society could be part of the change. And what does that mean is that we should aim to have our missions by 2030 from pre industrial revolution, which was what drove a lot of activity that increased that blanket and get to net zero by 2050, which is reducing our missions to the point of which we can’t. Uh, we have just residual emissions and actually buying removals or offsets to make sure that we are not emitting any more than what we’re producing. And so that’s what net zero is, but you’re absolutely right. Data, data, data. There’s issues with the way that data is produced. Um, consumed and produced. So let’s take your Evie example. You’re absolutely right. Then an Evie is not like net zero from its starting point. There’s manufacturing processes.

Frank Cottle [00:07:21] : You could be, you could do the calculation say, well. It takes 7.4 years for it to become net zero, uh, after its construction process. The, the same with with wind power, the, the same with solar. Um, there, there’s a construction process that is not net zero in all of these products. Yes, it, it’s calculable. But we’re not using that

Neil Yeoh[00:07:44] h: calculation. So we can’t take data just from a face value, nor can we only look at net zero is only about greenhouse gas emissions. What about water and chemicals and the air pollution that we cause that cause health issues that governments then have to pay for? So you’re absolutely right. That net zero is a simplified way for us to act as individual and in the workforce, and I’m happy to dive deeper into that about how organizations and why organizations should. Set a net zero commitment, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but it’s also going to be the future in terms of workforce and sustainable growth, but it’s also not just that simple to take data at face value.

Frank Cottle [00:08:25]: Well, I think, I think there’s two things that you said here. Uh, first, The contribution of greenhouse gases, uh, since the beginning of the industrial or since the industrial revolution, uh, so let’s call that starting about 1830s or so, um, you know, our population is more than doubled since then, almost it is about tripled since then. So the, it’s, it’s either a compounding problem or today it might be close to a diminishing problem because we’re having zero population growth in about two thirds of the world. Right now. Um, uh, so maybe we’re self correcting with out knowing it. Um, that’s, that’s one, you know, little far out consideration, uh, there. Um, uh, the other thing that you said was, you know, net zero is just about greenhouse gas emissions. It’s about clean water. It’s about clean everything. I don’t hear that from the politicians. I hear, stop fossil fuels, get rid of cows burping. You know, I hear all of these things, but I don’t hear anything about clean.

Neil Yeoh[00:09:37] : Yeah. That’s a, that’s a really good observation. It’s not only clean, but we use a lot of jargon that stops us to realize that the workforce is already working on green. They already have green skills. Like if you think about it, I’ll give you one example. We talked about Lean Six Sigma. You remember when. Uh, Japan was leading manufacturing and we thought, well, there’s operational efficiencies that we can have. Jobs should have process engineering skills. They should know how to use Kanban cards and things that help us make things more efficient. So we reduce costs. Did you know that that’s actually an adjacent green skill because green skills can also look at the supply chain about using less water, energy and resources in itself. Is a green skill and leads to net zero, but sometimes we don’t realize that the workforce already has embedded green skills. There are just also newer skills that are coming up, like the rise of AI, where one chat GPT search is actually 10 times the energy usage of one Google search. And so how do you sort of address these issues when. You know, a more energy intensive solution can cause more issues for the sustainability of our businesses.

Frank Cottle [00:10:51] : The, the, um, the green skills that you talk about, I wonder when you, when you say that, um, uh, bring up the six sigma and, and, and, uh, construction stuff. I wonder if the development of the intermodal system on just in time, inventory concepts, things of that nature. Are part of an unrecognized green skill that has been in existence for, well, that started in the mid nineties, I guess, for that long. And if so, and if we recognize it, how do we calculate the impact?

Neil Yeoh[00:11:28] : Yeah, this is. Absolutely right. I think, uh, and we noticed this from our own climate workforce playbook. We actually went out to industry and we were curious about the exact question that you had. How many of these green skills already exist, but we’re just calling them green, but they’ve existed for many years already. And which of these skills are new because of the impacts we’re causing that require us to think about it. Because we can’t sustainably grow without adopting them. And so we actually interviewed over 200 sustainability role and job seekers and recent hires. And we found that there were issues with their skill sets. So a lot of them already have skills like supply chain management. Data modeling and analysis. These are skills that are absolutely critical for any organization to get to net zero. Why? Because the majority of the company’s impact is in its supply chain, not in what it owns. And we have known that for years. And so therefore, there’s not only a financial opportunity to use the supply chain skills to net zero. But if you get upskilled a bit to understand how supply chains contribute to environmental impact, you can basically reapply your skills to the future of the workforce, which is going to have, in my opinion, embedded sustainability skills.

Frank Cottle [00:12:43] : Well, will those skills in your view be learned, calculated, uh, demonstrable, or will they just become the way we live?

Neil Yeoh[00:12:55] : Yeah, this is a good question. We can learn a lot from history. So you remember digital marketing in the 2010s, when it first came out, was almost like anything. We need to learn digital marketing and those used to be sought after skills We’re seeing it with ai like ai skills are really sought after but with digital marketing now all marketers have to know digital marketing So I think it’s going to happen in a phased way currently with sustainability. We’re kind of at that stage where it’s Uh, newish thing, but it’s been around, but we’re starting to say, Hey, we actually need these skills across the workforce, right? Not everyone needs to be a technical expert, but in order for us to. Like be able to operate in the 21st, 22nd century. We need to start to have some of these skills. Um, and so right now it’s kind of a side thing that we should learn. We should hire sustainability leads in, but as we move forward, forward, maybe in the next three, five years, you’ll notice that some of these skills will just be line items in a job description where it requires a procurement. Professional to know about greenhouse gas accounting because it’s natural and important for them to contribute to that business strategy

Frank Cottle [00:14:06]: Well, I I think you just said to me the most important word there was not greenhouse gas It was accounting.

Neil Yeoh[00:14:14] : Yes,

Frank Cottle [00:14:15] : and I think that When we’re talking about change management, which is what you’re talking about in business, in government, in societies, um, people have to be able to recognize, as I was saying about the data earlier, that it’s not lies, lies, and damn lies, that it’s, it’s actual. And so your accounting rules of how you determine your progress or your lack of progress or your return on effort have to be, they cannot be abstract. And I think today, um, You’ve got the COPE 29 going on. I think those guys are still very abstract.

Neil Yeoh[00:14:53]: Yes, absolutely.

Frank Cottle [00:14:55] : You know, we have the two things going on there. First, an immediate, um, um, passage of carbon credits, which half the people in the world think is pure bunk. Um, uh, you know, that’s a, that’s a first world countries opportunity to take advantage of third world countries.

Neil Yeoh[00:15:16] : Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:15:17] : Half the world thinks that the other half doesn’t think about it at all. Um, and then you have the blessings of fossil fuels, um, as a part of a keynote speech by the host of the meeting. Now we have been blessed with fossil fuels, how to recognize and create energy, um, uh, you know, through. The application of, of a variety of different fuels, how to make the progress we’ve made, but how, where does that take us in relationship to the accounting, especially I think the, um, the carbon credit accounting, uh, can you, a lot of people hear about that, but I don’t think they understand exactly how it works.

Neil Yeoh[00:16:01]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:16:03] : Credit accounting and let’s get to a specific example.

Neil Yeoh[00:16:07] : Yeah. I’m more than happy to explain this. I think maybe before we close off that last route on why people should care, because I don’t think we actually got there is there’s a LinkedIn. Green skills report that just got launched this week that people should definitely take a look at because there are two big statistics that people should know. Like, why should you even want like a skill, like greenhouse gas accounting? Like, why should I care? Why should I care to enhance my supply chain skills in the age of greening pathways? Well, one, we actually found that if you actually get a green skill, LinkedIn shows that it actually improves your hiring rate by 80%. And that’s in the US alone. And globally, if you get one green skill, you improve your hireability by 50%. Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:16:52] : Define a green skill that would do that. Yeah.

Neil Yeoh[00:16:54] : So let me give you one. I mean, green skills be as simple as, I don’t know. Energy efficiency, understanding the fact that LED lights are better than traditional light bulbs. That’s an example.

Frank Cottle [00:17:08] : Okay, so I have a college class from any university.

Neil Yeoh[00:17:12] : Yes.

Frank Cottle [00:17:12] : Um, or any college or, or I’ve taken even an accreditation course. hmm. It says, I understand the difference between incandescent lighting and LED lighting. You’re saying I have a 80 percent better chance of getting hired for a chosen position?

Neil Yeoh[00:17:30] : Yeah. Well, adding that green skill to your resume improves your hireability just because they are so in demand.

Frank Cottle [00:17:39] : I, I, I don’t know that I’m believing that. Because we hire a lot of people and we’ve never even asked the question. We don’t think it’s the, if I were hiring a manager to manage a green initiative or to manage an activity. Did  that dealt with that issue of transportation manager as an example.

Neil Yeoh[00:18:06] : Yeah

Frank Cottle [00:18:07] : That might apply but if I’m hiring a salesman or a salesperson to sell virtual offices Really 80 percent better.  I’m not going to look at that at all.

Neil Yeoh[00:18:20] : No, you’re absolutely right. So not, not all green skills are equal. Let me give you one example specifically from our net zero.

Frank Cottle [00:18:27] : Not all jobs are equal. Cause if your job doesn’t have the ability and your job function to apply the benefit of the green skills, You’ve acquired then it’s a zero sum game.

Neil Yeoh[00:18:41]: Yeah. Like, let me give you one example. So when it comes to those that have sustainability or climate or ESG in their role title, this is what we call sustainability majors. The one that are really leading the charge.

Frank Cottle [00:18:53] : Understand that.

Neil Yeoh[00:18:53] : Yeah. Let me give you one example that a greenhouse gas accounting or carbon accounting, which I’m just about to explain is a highly sought after skill set. The problem is that. In order to get these skill sets right now, just like with any new and growing space, it is one, you can’t get the skills unless you actually do the job.

You can’t do the job until you actually have the skill, which is why we actually built the 1. 5 Academy, which is like using coding academies to do. Micro credentials to train people because we’ve done over a hundred net zero projects. It’s almost like when coders train coders, we are training sustainability professionals because we need to, that skill is highly sought after and very hard to get that improves that higher ability rate.

And additionally, it’s because. There’s that two times growth difference. So there are two times the number of jobs that are in demand right now. Um, and again, it depends in different areas, but there’s only half the supply of talent because of some of the accessibility of the specific technical skills, yes, a hundred percent supply chain skills.

You can get them anywhere. Marketing skills, maybe. Uh, learn a bit about sustainability, but I’m talking about some of these like real technical things that are still brand new, like how many people have AI skills today, but how many people may have AI skills in say five years time, the same thing’s happening in sustainability.

Frank Cottle [00:20:16] : Well, people have always said most of my intelligence is artificial, so I was born with it, I guess. Um, one, one question I’ll ask, and I’m, I’m picking on you with this question, but

Neil Yeoh[00:20:27] : Go for it.

Frank Cottle [00:20:28] : What I think it’s important for people to understand when we throw out a number is Indeed is a, is a major hiring platform.

Yes. As a percentage of jobs available on Indeed, and you probably don’t know this one way or the other, so I’m putting you on the spot, but how many of them say must have sustainability skills in order to be fired? What percentage? One percent? One percent? Three percent? Do you have any idea on that? Cause that’s your main to your, your, your main point.

Neil Yeoh[00:21:02] : Yeah. I can give you it from the LinkedIn side. Cause we have that partnership. In fact, that green skills report mentioned our academy this week was great, which is a skilling pathway. Um, so LinkedIn identified 41, 000 skills across. Or jobs across 250 categories out of those 41, 000 skills, about 1, 200 are green skills.

So we can do a bit of the calculation. It’s not, yes, it’s about a quarter of the percent, but the thing to note is that it is growing at a rapid rate. I think there’s a growth in not only existing skills that have then line items requiring green skills, but also these new green skills, like how do you measure the carbon emissions of AI?

The energy intensity, cause it’s not only. Sustainable, but it’s also the cost of these data centers that now big tech have to have. So you’re having these kind of recategorization of existing skills. Yes, they’re not like the majority of skills, but they are growing rapidly and probably will grow more and more throughout the years.

Frank Cottle [00:22:03] : Well, one, one thing I’ve noticed in support of your point is My wife and I are very close to a particular college. It’s a small, small school that we both attended, uh, and that sort of thing. And when we look at their curriculum, uh, cause we do a scholarship thing with them, when we look at their curriculum, um, we noticed.

This year they added a sustainability major.

Neil Yeoh[00:22:27] : Yes.

Frank Cottle [00:22:28] : Uh, and this is a small liberal arts college, uh, uh, overall, not an engineering school or something like that, but they did add a sustainability major as, uh, a part of, uh, what they felt was important in planning for the future. Um, and do you have any data on how many colleges or universities are doing that? Um, and what the, how you get from that one point something percent to 10%, 10 percent in any skill set. Is massive. Massive. Okay. Um, um, one, one and a half percent is not there yet. complimental or, or, or private.

Neil Yeoh[00:23:16] : Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:23:16] : Um, uh, to, to, to really carry change management.

Neil Yeoh[00:23:21] : Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:23:22] : Overall, any idea on the curriculum changes?

Neil Yeoh[00:23:26] : Yeah, so data points, no, but let me tell you one data point, which is that Gen Zs will be, I think, one in Every like 30 percent of the workforce by 2030. And if we just think about Gen Z as a whole and what they’ve had to inherit in terms of the world that we have and what they buy by their values, we’re seeing this direction that it’s undeniable that they want to Actually get educated on the environment and sustainability in, in, in large masses, which then I think drives the demand of these academic institutions to offer it.

And then on the other side, since a lot of organizations are hiring for it. And by the way, they’re also hiring because there’s regulations coming, whether they like it or not from the EU to the U S and we know that regulations just like they did for like food and safety caused a lot of. Acceleration of skills is also showing up in academia where they need to, to have these majors, but the one anecdote I’d use is the story that I actually did a master’s of environmental management at Yale University.

I love the university, but unfortunately, I only learned less than 10 percent of the skills that I needed to actually be in the sustainability field.

Frank Cottle [00:24:37] : Yeah, we’ve got a good old boy network that can’t quit.

Neil Yeoh[00:24:42] : But I think there’s something to be said here that a lot of academics are starting to have majors like Masters of Sustainability, Environmental Sciences, but if we think about academia historically, they are great.

For slower moving industries. So potentially like policies, environmental sciences, great. But what happens when you have these practitioner skills, like skills in industry, which are changing every three months. And even with AI, we know that skill sets are outpacing the ability for academia to keep up. So academia has a role to play to give us the fundamental climate.

Science, the knowledge of what policy can be, but when it comes to the skills that we need today, based on the regulations that just got announced in California or the EU regulations that are now rolling through industry, we kind of need a bit more of a practitioner led model, which is why I think there’s a huge room for micro credentials.

There’s huge room for organizational leaders to actually invest into. Practitioner led skills or applied skills learning for their workforce. Not only to upskill them with the latest information that’s out there. In the last three months, not in the last three years, like academics are, but also to improve retention and to follow this line that we’re seeing into the future, which is you’re eventually going to have to have this skill to improve your ability to do your job as a business professional.

And that’s kind of my prediction.

Frank Cottle [00:26:07] F: Well, you know, I, I think that’s true. It, it, it comes down to the Uh, again, we’re talking change management and simple, simple firms. You’re the one that brought up Six Sigma. So I’ll stick with change management for a minute. Um, that requires a majority of people to buy in, and it also requires the will of those in authority during good times and bad times to sustain that change management effort, and I’ll use it. The United States as an example, and I’ll go back to the, uh, uh, late eighties, early nineties, um, uh, we, we passed in the United States back then, what was called the clean air act.

Neil Yeoh[00:26:53] : Yes.

Frank Cottle [00:26:54] : There may not be familiar with it. Um, the clean air act had a lot of rules and regulations about what companies had to do, didn’t have to do.

Uh, it, it instigated the instituted the practice of telecommuting and. Uh, carbon credits and all of the things that we’re still talking about today. But after about three or four years, five years, maybe there was a governmental change. Um, there was an economic change at the same time and the. Authorities lost the will to prosecute the plan effectively, and it went away.

It evaporated. Even though it was, it was, it was working. They lost the will to sustain the plan. The effort, we’re all, and the reason that seemed to be is they couldn’t find the return on investment.

Neil Yeoh[00:27:58]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:27:59] : They couldn’t find the data that really made a difference. And when we talk about climate change, uh, or even want to go to global warming for a second, and we talk about that, if it’s all going only one way.

And there’s all these efforts going on and no one can see that those efforts are having an impact. Will people sustain the will to

Neil Yeoh[00:28:28] : try? That’s a really good question. I mean, that’s been the overarching question since COVID pandemic really forced us to think about the future of the world. There was this uprising, at least in my field of people wanting to say, well, we need to care about the planet and the future generations that we have.

But you’re absolutely right. When push comes to shove, will we still Do this work. And I think there are two things that I kind of want to share. One is that we have never seen such. Bad impact on commodity prices, natural disasters, whether you believe that their climate change related or not, that are starting to become undeniable and actually hitting our bottom line compared to the past.

But the second one, bringing it to the workforce is this concept of embedded sustainability. So let me give you one specific story. I actually interviewed the CSO or the chief sustainability officer, which is the C suite. That oversees sustainability of Starbucks. And he was one of our guests for the 1. 5 Academy.

Cause we love to bring industry experts and say, Hey, what does it show up with in the actual real world? And as many people might know, Starbucks has had a shift in its CEO, maybe like Several CEOs in the last couple of years. Yes. You might say they still use single use carbs and they’re not really sustainable, but they have still been able to make progress on sustainability because of this idea of embedded sustainability, meaning that.

Starbucks is team sustainability team for its whole globe is, I think, 10 people, like not that many people at all, but their full workforce, they have people in the barista or their product team that have sustainability skills, they have people in the procurement team that it team, their finance team. And so the CSO said, Despite CEO changes and the impacts on the economics, they’re still able to progress on sustainability because they started to embed these skills across different departments.

So this is exactly really exciting to me because it’s what we’re basically seeing with this whole industry. Just like I said, digital marketing used to be something that was a really high in demand skill. Now it’s kind of integrated into all of marketing. Some firms that have already been trying to do sustainability have realized that the real goal is to get.

Your whole workforce trained in some type of sustainability skill. Like not everyone needs to be a technical expert, but imagine what is possible to make it sticky. You

Frank Cottle [00:30:49] : know, Starbucks could have a big contribution to sustainability just by not using the fuel to over roast their coffee.

Neil Yeoh[00:30:58] : That is true.

Frank Cottle [00:30:58]: They burn it. But, um, Using Starbucks as an example, let’s, let’s, uh, compliment and pick, pick on them at the same time. Um, great effort. Ten folks embedding, uh, consciousness, sustainability consciousness throughout the organization. That, that’s important. You can’t have change without that, uh, no matter what.

Um, what percentage of reduction have they made per, uh, Any metric overall that we would say is measurable.

Neil Yeoh[00:31:36] : Yeah. Yeah. That’s a, that is a great, great thing. So we can come back to what we call carbon accounting. Maybe I can explain it in that way because yeah, we really need to define what that is. So for those that don’t understand what carbon accounting is, it’s like financial accounting.

It’s just, instead of looking at the financial health of an organization, we’re looking at the environmental health. Of an organization. So there’s a lot of parallels between the two fields. It’s an annual statement. It has line items. It has numbers. You compare them year to year. And what greenhouse gas or carbon accounting was trying to do was to create a methodology that allowed organizations to measure their direct impact.

Emissions. So these are buildings that they own the heat, steam, energy usage that they have, you know, even the use of their products, the end of life of their products, their capital investments, or these little line items kind of show up just like a cashflow statement or a profit and loss statement in a way that was trying to make it.

accountable for organizations to measure these elements that can be compared year on year and also for these statements to be compared against other companies. So yeah,

Frank Cottle [00:32:45] : I’ll interrupt and ask a question. I apologize for that, but in financial accounting,

Neil Yeoh[00:32:52] : yes,

Frank Cottle [00:32:53] : we have Rules. Yes. Those rules are auditable.

Is there an, are the rules for carbon accounting set to the same level of standards and equally auditable by outside third parties so that we see those reports, we know they’re auditable. Accurate.

Neil Yeoh[00:33:24] : Yeah. Yes, they are, but they must get better. So green carbon,

Frank Cottle [00:33:31] : if they either are, they aren’t, that’s a black.

No, they,

Neil Yeoh[00:33:33] : okay. I would say that. No, I would say no, but the reason why I believe it will be is twofold. So one, let’s just touch on your point. Um, greenhouse gas or carbon accounting as 1930s. Okay. So we knew how much creative accounting we had. Okay.

Frank Cottle [00:33:50] : It has no basis in accuracy.

Neil Yeoh[00:33:54] : So I’m saying it as it is.

There’s still, it’s

Frank Cottle [00:33:58]: okay. It tells us where we are versus where we need to get to.

Neil Yeoh[00:34:01] : It’s historically voluntary. You know, you can include certain items. You don’t have to include others. Um, but the reason why we are moving to audit and assurance is. Because of the regulations that are coming. So both in the U S and Europe, and we all know that supply chains are global.

So the rest of the globe is going to have to show up because a carbon accounting statement in the U S. For a big company probably touches all suppliers around the world. If there’s someone like Starbucks, so everyone’s going to have to submit data for it to be audited and assured. The number one job that’s actually popping up in high demand for the workforce is the ESG controller, like this environmental social governance controller, which are basically like, you know, how the big four have audit advisors, a lot of the big four now are getting asked to come in and audit carbon accounting statements, because all of a sudden.

The report’s not just voluntary. It has to be submitted either as part of a regulation, or it’s going to require like further detail. So we’re seeing this transition of what used to be a voluntary nice to do to almost a must do that’s forcing us to highly accelerate the process. Not only the development of and maturity of these standards but also The the work that needs to be done and this is why it impacts the workforce because and we talked to this Uh the head of esg from meta and so she also came and spoke to our academy members and let me give you one example Um, there is a new standard Called CSRD in EU.

So you don’t have to worry about it too much, but there’s a new standard. That’s going to change the accounting laws. And that just came out a few months ago. So academics and academic programs do not even have it in their curriculum. Right. And she’s having to spend half of her time interpreting this knowledge, trying to get change management, talk to her stakeholders to convince them.

First of all, what is it? What do I have to care? And what, how does that change my reporting? And she’s wasted about six months of her time doing that because there isn’t the basic competency and ability to distribute that knowledge across the workforce. So what’s happening right now is not only this acceleration of this maturity of accounting or other skills that are required because of regulations, but there’s a increased.

Acceleration of continuous learning that’s actually needed in the workforce for it to actually keep up with everything and so That’s where we’re seeing a lot of change.

Frank Cottle [00:36:31] : Well, you know, I’m gonna make a statement. You you may or may that you’ll probably disagree with But

green is a part of the future of work

and its acceleration or its importance inside of the future work Ultimately has to be measurable Return on investment.

Neil Yeoh[00:36:57]: Yes

Frank Cottle [00:36:58] : shareholders to the shareholders of the Organizations. Yes, we’ll have green practices. Yes And candidly, I don’t see Meta’s stock going up or down as a result of this young lady’s work.

Neil Yeoh[00:37:12] : Yeah, and you’re absolutely right. There is difference between the two.

Frank Cottle [00:37:16] : That’s what has to happen. I mean, we drive things off selfishness. The other, other thing I’ll, I’ll, I’ll reference is that you’ve referenced Gen Z several times. Uh, uh, you know, I’m obviously falling into the boomer category, uh, but having been in that category or being an advanced part of that category now, I will make the statement that all generations think they invented peace, sex, and now sustainability.

Um, every generation at its form, formulative period. Believes that they have changed or they will change these things. And yet it doesn’t seem to happen in the way that we all wanted it to, or hoped it would, or believed it would, as we mature into the Second, third, fourth level generations, fifth level in my case, um, so, so I, I mean, this is incredibly important stuff for a whole variety of reasons, but at what cost and at what disregarding climate change, we all believe, those of us that do believe at least, and I’m one of them, that the climate change is, Active and we are, do have a responsibility whether we caused it or not.

We have a responsibility to see that we don’t cause it.

Neil Yeoh[00:38:50] : Yes.

Frank Cottle [00:38:51] : You know, so we, if it’s something in our control, it’s our responsibility to ourselves and to future generations, but mostly to ourselves right now, because there’s generations out there today, forget the next ones. There’s five. You know, we got a big span, a hundred years of people here that we can, we can impact.

Um, so, you know, at, at what cost and when do we, when do we identify the thing that everybody goes, aha, yeah. Yeah. I get it. I’m going to do that. And, and, and is that a first world thing only? Or wait a second, the first world doesn’t have the majority of the population. Is that a first and second? Uh, the fastest growing is the third, uh, our first and second world countries are actually shrinking a little bit slowly, not, not sustaining their population.

Um, so we have to make this a third world country priority.

Neil Yeoh[00:39:51] : Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:39:52] : Because that’s where the growth of population is. How do you do that?

Neil Yeoh[00:39:56] : Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:39:56] : We have to end on that because we’re running long and I apologize to say that, but how do you do that?

Neil Yeoh[00:40:04] : Yeah, so this is, this is a great question. The one thing I would sort of say is that we all need to get smarter about climate.

And, and this The issue that we have is knowledge. How do we understand and gain knowledge, especially in the workforce to progress our careers and to know that what we’re doing is going to be a net positive, ideally from a purpose standpoint and from an outcome standpoint. So even on our website, opf.

degree, we have a monthly newsletter to basically answer these questions. We do the advisory work. We do the academy work. We launch these reports because it’s literally these questions, Frank, that we almost spend so much time grappling with that we then don’t know how to apply it into our careers, into the workforce.

What do I do? But what we just fundamentally need to know is that green, going back to the green conversation, it already exists. We, it is not business as usual, but it’s an evolution Of what the workforce looks like into the future to accommodate for the impacts that will damage the bottom line will not allow us to grow revenues as we want.

And we found from even reports from IBM that if you actually do what we’re already doing, but apply these green skills, you will likely have 16 percent more revenue growth. You have. 52 percent likely of outperforming peers. And if you don’t believe all of that, like there are financial and environmental models called marginal abatement cost curves that we teach, which is combining financial modeling on an ROI with environmental modeling to actually show that there are two times likely to reduce the operating cost, whether it’s using renewable energy, which is lower, or it’s investing into more resilient materials, less waste, all of which adds to not only lower costs, but also But higher revenue through the reputation that you make, but yes, you’re absolutely right.

There are going to be things that cost more money. They’re going to take more time. And I think from a psychological standpoint, it’s like a meteor is coming to us, but we’re not worried about it because it hasn’t hit us yet. I think we always as human nature just need to see things and we need to sometimes change our perspective to realize that this meteor will eventually hit us just like the don’t look up movie, which I think was great.

That actually hinders our ability to actually build the workforce of the future.

Frank Cottle [00:42:20] : Well, I’ve seen two meteor movies. One we won and the other one we lost. So, you know, I, I, I, but I get what you’re saying about that. You know, we, we, there is some, uh, A sense of urgency that people need to, uh, understand. Um, but it’s hard for them to understand that sense of urgency.

They can’t see the specific return on the investment they’re making to.

Neil Yeoh[00:42:52] : Exactly. And if you are any professional out there and you’re like, well, I don’t have sustainability in my role. I don’t really care. I mean, you can see it from this way that I believe that all jobs, if you get a green skill and it shows in the data, you are future proofing your career.

And as a workforce leader, you’re future proofing your workforce because of the impacts that we’re already feeling and are going to feel when that meteor hits. So why don’t we get prepared, build that hunker down and build ourselves?

Frank Cottle [00:43:19] : No, it’s funny that kind of, uh, Cycles back to the current discussion or argument that’s post pandemic about remote work versus return to office and differences in commuting costs and all those sorts of things.

Some of that is green skill based and some of that is denier based. Uh, so we see it all around us. I don’t know that everybody recognizes though, that those are green issues as much as they are HR issues.

Neil Yeoh[00:43:52]: Exactly. Exactly. We need to get past the terminology and just call it as it is. These are things that are already existing.

We’re just repackaging them in a way where it allows us to know that we’re making the impact. So we’re not saying change the way that you’re doing things, but maybe rethink and upskill and reskill. Such that, you know, we’ll see workforce changes. So like one example, oil and gas workers. Now we’ve seen a high increase in hiring and renewable jobs, but oil and gas jobs are very similar for geothermal.

They’re very similar for renewables. It just requires a tiny bit of upskilling that gets jobs then shifting, not the skills, but then pathways forwards. And so we have to just think about it that way.

Frank Cottle [00:44:34] : If you could address the audience and say, if there was one thing. Everyone could do as a practice, just one thing that didn’t cost us anything that made the hard part.

Um, what would it be that would be the greatest single green skill we could apply that would have the greatest impact on the future as we see it today?

Neil Yeoh[00:45:07] : Yeah, you know, one thing I would sort of say is for us to read and that may not sound like attaining a green school, but. I really believe that a lot of the information is already out there, obviously beyond the beliefs that you have.

But in this society, we’re always looking for the cliff notes version. We’re always looking for that tick talk or that short YouTube reel. And we don’t actually patiently spend a bit of time just reading about the issues that we care about, reading about where the workforce is going. Cause as soon as you do that, and that’s completely free, right?

The LinkedIn reports free our climate workforce playbook is free on our website. You’ll start to connect the dots very quickly and already become smarter about how to be positioned and prepared for where the workforce is moving.

Frank Cottle [00:45:54] : I’d like someone to do a study. You mentioned TikTok. Energy consumed by charging instruments, phones, pads, et cetera.

And the amount of lights on in the rooms of all the people watching TikTok reels. Overall, how much energy is consumed versus what benefit is produced. Uh, you know, uh, I’m sure I offended half the planet. Neil, thank you, uh, your generosity and sharing your thoughts and your ideas and, and the amazing work that you and your organization do.

Um are really appreciated here and if someone wanted to reach you or wanted to reach your organization and learn more directly Yeah, what would they go

Neil Yeoh[00:46:40] : about

Frank Cottle [00:46:40] : doing that? Yeah, they should one

Neil Yeoh[00:46:42] : reach out to me on linkedin neil Yo, you can look me up and you find me. The second thing is our website www. opf.

degree we have A lot of resources there. And if you want to join our training program, we trained over 800 people in 50 countries in the last 18 months. And we’re building up this movement of people who really believe and want to get up skilled and want to do it in an attainable and cost effective way.

So please reach out and we’re here. We’re here to work on the work. We’re here to help with the workforce transformation one way or another. So thank you so much, Frank.

Frank Cottle [00:47:18] : My pleasure. Take care.

Neil Yeoh[00:47:19] : Take care.