Adoption of Green Skills: Examining the Role of Higher Education in Addressing Change Readiness and Resistance

Global challenges within the economic, environmental, and political arenas, including climate change, shortage of resources, pollution, increased migration, and the recent global COVID-19 crisis, accompanied by changes in technologies, behavior, and policies, have led to the “greening” of businesses and communities. This chapter aims to identify the most important green skills demanded by industries since recent literature, although relatively scarce, suggests that higher education institutions must follow labor market developments by revising and updating their curriculum so that it more directly creates and reflects the green dimension of modern job requirements. In addition, this chapter tackles the issue of organization members’ readiness to accept change in green industry. Adopting green skills can challenge an organization and its members since it assumes the need for additional learning and presents a change in established organizational behavior. The problem emerges because, in general, people resist change since, usually, they do not want to abandon what they have already learned and relearn what is needed to work more efficiently and effectively. Therefore, including green skills in higher education programs may address this problem by minimizing change resistance and facilitating organizational members’ adoption of green skills.