Greening of human resources: Environmental awareness and training interests within the workforce

The education and training of the workforce has long been recognised as an essential ingredient in promoting and implementing environmental management practices in business organisations. So far, however, even in leading companies, little information has been available on how environmental management practice and related educational and training requirements are translated into the provision of training courses by educational institutions. To address this important question an EU-sponsored research project was initiated. The project has focused on senior environmental managers; middle (predominantly technical) managers; and skilled and semi-skilled workers and lower categories of managers. It has been based partly on interviews in a small number of European companies as well as educational and training institutions, and partly on more large-scale questionnaire surveys. This paper briefly describes the background of the overall project, and in more detail a questionnaire-based survey on environmental attitudes and training interests among Danish workers.