Sustainability training: Top tips for creating effective L&D initiatives which deliver results
Originally published with co-author Tam Hussey in Edie, March 25 2025. Read the original article here.
Sustainable business advisors Jenny Salpietro and Tam Hussey reflect on their recent work helping firms to deliver engaging, impactful staff training programmes. These schemes can be make or break for the delivery of environmental targets, and present a win-win in terms of upskilling and meeting stakeholder expectations.
Several companies have made headlines recently for rolling back their climate commitments. It can be argued that, for any business to make such changes, commitments were not strategic priorities in the first instance – they were an aside, or a window dressing, rather than being embedded.
Baking sustainability into an organisation necessitates capacity building – specifically, training and upskilling the workforce beyond the chief sustainability officer (CSO). This not only maximises opportunities to attract, retain and upskill talent, but to prepare to meet regulatory requirements and the changing demands of key stakeholders. A clear example is the growing adoption of Transition Plans.
This is easier said than done. In our experience, training for sustainability initiatives is proving difficult for even the most determined leaders.
Common challenges include:
Knowing where to start, given that there are so many training courses and topics across a highly decentralised ecosystem
Limited budgets to put towards training
Competing priorities for mindshare among key stakeholders
The fact that sustainability is a new learning area for most HR and L&D partners, and something that they may not have clear recommendations on yet
But these challenges must be overcome: engaging, upskilling and mobilizing your workforce at scale is the only way to bring your strategy to life and to meet publicly stated targets in a real, durable way.
So what’s the answer? There’s no one-size-fits-all, but there is a way to evaluate what will work best for your organisation and tailor your approach accordingly. There are three main types of training we see being leveraged, all with their own pros and cons.
But before we get into that, let’s define our sustainability training success criteria. In our experience, successful sustainability training is training which is:
Completed
Aligned to meeting the organisation’s sustainability targets
Can be immediately applied, recognised and rewarded
Now onto the approaches:
1) Awareness training:
This training approach provides broad education on climate change or the basics of sustainability. It is intended to deepen personal understanding or commitment to climate action – a popular option is Climate Fresk.
Pros:
Gets sustainability on the radar of the average employee and builds a common language across staff
Easy to find a provider at an affordable price point
There is a feel-good factor to do this training – it gives a sense of excitement and momentum
Cons:
Content is not typically clearly linked to organisational strategy or follow-up action in the workplace
Does not add any specific technical skills
May waste the ‘first bite of the cherry’ – people may be less likely to engage in any follow-up training if this training is not actionable
When to use it:
This is good as the starting point of part of a broader, integrated sustainability engagement plan. If you’ll be building upon this with additional applied training, it can be a great foundation for that work. However, as a standalone training, it is unlikely to drive significant impact.
2) Skills training:
This is typically departmental or functional training, where a skillset has been identified as ‘good to have’ and then deployed for the appropriate teams. Think circularity for product designers, Scope 3 emissions measurement for procurement, or integrating financial and GHG reporting for finance.
Pros:
Off-the-shelf training exists for you to host at your organization or enroll your workforce into a public session (e.g. CSRD Institute for CSRD reporting and compliance; Ellen McArthur Foundation for circularity)
Builds clear, actionable skillsets and expertise for segments of your workforce
Enables change at the departmental or functional level
Cons:
If there’s no clear path for staff to leverage the learning within their role, demotivation could be a risk
Lacks connective tissue across departments. Many organisational sustainability goals and initiatives stretch across functions – upskilling some teams but not others may result in uneven forward progress
When to use it:
This type of training is ideal when you have a clear sustainability strategy, a clearly identified learning need, and a clear solution to address the gap. This approach is made more powerful by having a structure in place to support the application of the learning: senior stakeholder commitment, an immediate workstream or project to apply the new skills, and ways to incentivise and reward action.
3) Activation training:
This is bespoke training custom-built collaboratively between L&D professionals, the sustainability team and functional leaders. It is tightly linked to a company’s sustainability strategy – and ideally departmental sustainability strategies – all laddering up to tracked sustainability metrics and targets.
Picture a two-day workshop bringing together two cross-functional teams that need to attack a shared sustainability goal. The content includes technical learning, aligning on shared KPIs and co-designing new processes and ways of collaborating cross-functionally.
Pros:
Adds specific skills aligned to the learning needs of the people in the room
Tightly linked to the specific sustainability goals of the organisation, department and team
Addresses not only skill acquisition but also the “how” of working differently
Highly likely to result in practical application, behaviour change and impact
Cons:
It is more time-consuming to design bespoke training
May be more costly
Requires supporting infrastructure to enable people to activate their learning
Requires stakeholder support and cultural enablement – for example, an important cultural factor will be the welcoming of innovation and willingness to try, fail fast, and pivot.
When to use it:
This type of very tailored approach can be the most impactful, but it requires a strong foundation of support. We recommend starting small, in select places (e.g. departments) in your organisation that are ready for this work and are prepared to do the groundwork to make it stick.
Invest in this type of training when you have the right people to support you: functional leaders who are willing to invest the time to train their people. You also need the right processes set up to enable people to apply the training in their day-to-day work and see tangible (measurable) results.
Additionally, you will need HR or L&D partners to help you map the skillsets and build the training with you. And finally, you’ll need reward mechanisms to incentivise taking the training and activating the new ways of working.
The bottom line
All three types of training have their merits, and we recommend taking a thoughtful, blended approach to training. Assess honestly where your organisation is today in terms of sustainability ambition and maturity, and select among the “menu” of options outlined above, combining different types of training.
How to phase in your sustainability training:
When you’re ready to launch sustainability training, we suggest that you start small and strategic. Each successful training engagement will demonstrate value to the business, which you can leverage to build internal momentum and scale your efforts over time.
What does small and strategic look like?
Our recommendation is to start with teams or departments where you’re well-positioned for a win. Consider departments a) with “friendly” or “early adopter” leaders who are eager to partner with you and seek a shared success story b) where you can have a significant (ideally quick) impact based on your sustainability strategy c) where there is a shared business case e.g. a win for you is also a win for them from a cost-saving or other KPI point of view.
Once you’ve found the right department, we’d recommend our phased sustainability training approach to bring this effort to life:
Listen to the department leadership & employees to gauge sustainability understanding and appetite
Explain your company’s sustainability strategy and discuss areas of alignment with the department leadership
Prioritise key teams or roles in the department that you will need to engage
Translate your overarching sustainability goals into a co-created departmental sustainability strategy with clear objectives, activities, outcomes and targets.
Conduct a skills gap analysis to determine the optimal training approach. Work out what supporting infrastructure you need to enable the training (policies, partners, processes, budgets)
Activate by co-creating the training and build out supporting infrastructure. Deliver training with a focus on practical application and generating quick wins.
Embed and measure: Set targets and measure the effectiveness of training. Build ongoing learning and collaboration opportunities. Encourage and monitor ‘social proof’ from senior stakeholders.
Celebrate successes with internal and external communication
The World Economic Forum stated it well in a recent energy transition article: “To meet today’s global sustainability challenges, the corporate world needs more than a few CSOs – it needs an army of employees, in all areas of the business, thinking about sustainability in their decisions every day”.
Building your army takes time and effort, and each thoughtful training engagement you deploy will get you closer to it.
Tam Hussey, founder of Halo by Design, and Jenny Salpietro, founder of Andiamo Advisory
