Reading time: ~6 minutes | Series: PEARL on ESG | Audience: VET educators, policy-makers, SME leaders
If you want to know whether Europe's green transition will succeed, do not look at the legislation. Look at who is being trained to install the heat pumps, wire the solar farms, audit the supply chains, and run the small businesses doing all of the above.
That is, increasingly, a Vocational Education and Training (VET) story. And it is one of the most encouraging stories in European sustainability right now.
In most OECD countries, around a third of young people hold an upper-secondary vocational qualification. VET graduates dominate exactly the sectors the green transition depends on: construction, energy, transport, manufacturing, agriculture. According to OECD research published in 2025, VET graduates are already heavily over-represented in identifiable "green jobs". The question is no longer whether VET matters for sustainability, it is how quickly VET systems can adapt.
A useful way to track the shift: in March 2026, EU ministers, social partners and stakeholders signed the Herning Declaration, setting out 13 objectives for VET between 2026 and 2030, explicitly framing the system as a driver of the green and digital transitions.
Denmark has gone further than most in carving out climate-specific vocational institutions. Rybners Technical School in Esbjerg focuses on wind and solar energy. Herningsholm specialises in climate-friendly agriculture and sustainable construction. Technical Education Copenhagen runs programmes in green transport and logistics. The Danish approach blends substantial public investment in equipment with sustained teacher training, recognising that you cannot teach modern wind technology with old textbooks and last-decade simulators.
Dutch VET providers have increasingly oriented around the circular economy: not as a single subject, but as a lens through which existing programmes, engineering, design, logistics, hospitality, are reframed. Students don't just learn to design a product; they learn to design it for disassembly. They don't just learn supply chain management; they learn how to close the loop.
Austrian VET colleges have been particularly successful at embedding sustainability into business and management programmes, not as a separate module, but woven through marketing, accounting, operations, and HR teaching. The model is one PEARL has drawn on directly, and recent project work has documented Austrian VET teaching ESG concepts in ways that map naturally onto how SMEs actually operate.
Ireland's National Recovery and Resilience Plan includes a measure specifically aimed at accelerating decarbonisation in the enterprise sector, targeted to fund at least 750 projects, with a complementary measure on digital transformation expected to reach 720 companies by Q2 2026. Much of this is delivered through VET-aligned providers, ensuring the funding hits the workforce as well as the technology.
The European Training Foundation's Green Skills Award 2026, open for entries until 27 March 2026, recognises completed initiatives delivering measurable impact in green skills and supporting a fair, sustainable transition. It is open to schools, employers, NGOs, VET providers, and others. Winners gain visibility through EU events including EU Green Week and the ETF Skills Summit, and a #ForOurPlanet Prize specifically rewards initiatives on nature restoration and environmental protection. Awards like this matter not just for the winners; they create a shared evidence base of what "good" looks like, which is precisely what an emerging field needs.
Looking across the projects above, the same ingredients keep appearing:
That last point is precisely the gap the PEARL Knowledge Framework and Modular Learning Materials were built to address. Available in English, Danish, German, Polish, and Turkish, the materials are designed to be picked up by VET educators and adapted to local SME contexts without needing a sustainability consultant in the room.
Europe's green transition will be delivered by people, not policies. The colleges and trainers turning out the next generation of skilled workers, and the SMEs employing them, are doing the substantive work. The good news is that, country by country, programme by programme, that work is visibly accelerating.
Next in the series: The "S" in ESG — why people strategy is suddenly a boardroom issue.