Green Skills are Important to the Public Sector in More Ways than You Realise

With the Public Procurement Act 2023 coming into action in February 2025, it is more important than ever that businesses in the public sector provide social value as a part of their transactions. An excellent way of achieving this is through working with a business that is able to provide green skills and educate young people.

What are Green Skills?

A green skill is the term for any abilities, values, mindset or knowledge that supports a sustainable society. There are a wide variety of green skills, all of which are important for making a shift towards sustainability. It’s important to understand that green skills can be integrated into multiple job roles; finance, procurement, operations can all benefit from a sustainable mindset in order to improve value, reporting and impact in every area of the business.

Why are Green Skills Important?

Sustainability is becoming increasingly important. It is an unavoidable fact that in order to continue progressing as a society, we need to make some significant changes that take the planet and its people into consideration. To make said changes, we need to increase the number of green skilled workers. Green skills are essential to live, work and support the sustainable and resource-efficient world that we are all aiming for. Green skills also give you a fantastic advantage in the job market.

Additionally, the COP recognises that training in green skills is essential if we are to reach out climate targets by their respective deadlines, such as Net Zero by 2050.

Green Skills with Techbuyer

We offer green skills training in a variety of ways at Techbuyer. We offer IEMA accredited training courses for all levels, whether it provides a first step into sustainability and green skills in the workforce or acts as the jumping off point for a career in sustainability. We offer Sustainable Skills for the Workforce training to all members of our team; this allows us to encourage knowledge sharing around our business and to develop new and innovative sustainable projects in all departments. Recently a number of our own team members took this a step further and completed their IEMA Foundation in Environmental Managment training to become IEMA Associated Members.

Similarly, in 2019, Techbuyer began supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals, pledging to achieve nine, measurable targets that were chosen after internal discussions about what was important to our team and stakeholders. One of the targets we identified was hours spent educating young people.

Educating young people has been a powerful strategy to reach our targets, and we have also implemented ‘teach the teacher’ strategies to ensure a long-standing impact beyond any sessions our team provide. Recently, our team headed down to London for the CGI Sustainability Careers Festival in front of a number of local schools. This followed on from a previous session at New College Pontefract.

You Gain Social Value from Our Actions

The Public Procurement Act 2023 came into effect in February 2025, and with it comes a requirement for public sector buyers to think more about who they do business with, as well as the need to add social value into their contracts. But how is this social value quantified?

To maintain a consistent measurement, the Model Award Criteria (MAC) framework is used. The MAC framework is a key part of the UK’s Social Value Model and helps to ensure procurement processes deliver additional social value.

This means that it is no longer enough for an organisation to provide social value, but also the businesses you work with must do the same. Purchasing hardware from Techbuyer is a straightforward way of ensuring this requirement is met. Our team provides sustainable IT solutions, works to educate young people on IT hardware, and regularly provides donations to numerous charities, such as ITSA Digital Trust.

Sustainable Practice is Nothing New

Sustainability has always been a focus at Techbuyer. For a number of years, we have supported research into sustainable IT use, disposal and procurement, including IEEE papers regarding Circular Economy. We also provide customers with a carbon calculation that represents the amount of CO2e that they have saved by choosing refurbished. This is all on top of aligning ourselves with the UN Global Goals.

Get Ahead with Green Skills

We are now offering green skills training for public sector customers when they choose to work with Techbuyer. This not only offers social value to the transaction but also provides team members with valuable new skills they can take forwards in their careers.