Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategies are developed, targets are established, and commitments are made at leadership level, yet translating those intentions into day-to-day behaviour across the workforce continues to be a costly challenges organisations face.  
  
This gap was the starting point for a recent webinar hosted jointly by EIT Campus and Learnsy, bringing together experts from HR, sustainability, learning, and organisational development to discuss on how organisations build the skills and culture needed to make sustainability actionable.  

The panel drew participants from Asia to South America. What came out of it were five lessons that any professional and organisation serious about sustainability should be paying attention to. 

5 Key Lessons on Sustainability Skills 

1. A people transformation  

Organisations can have a beautifully written ESG strategy, complete with targets, timelines, and a dedicated team to own it. And it can still go nowhere as strategies don’t make daily decisions, but people do.  

During the webinar, Pippi Blomqvist mentioned that real impact only happens when employees understand how sustainability connects to their work and feel genuinely empowered to act on it. Not just the sustainability manager, not just leadership, but everyone.  

In the discussion Suvi Ferraz brought up a practical example of this. If even one person on a project team doesn’t understand or value sustainability, decisions that started out well-intentioned can quietly drift in the wrong direction. It can mean cost-cutting for short term savings forgetting long-term positive impact, and wrong material swaps. These small choices that add up to the bigger picture. Organisations need a cultural change which is built by people, delivered one decision at a time.  

2. Sustainability skills are no longer optional  

According to the panel discussion, it’s hard for employees to identify what sustainability means in their own job roles. Sustainability is no longer a niche concern for specialists. It touches procurement, finance, marketing, HR, operations. Every function across the organisation in every level.  

And the external pressure is only growing. Regulation is tightening. Investors are asking harder questions. Customers and talent expect more.   

3. Relevant learning  

When the webinar audience was asked to name their biggest challenge around sustainability learning, the top answer wasn’t budget or time. It was about translating ESG priorities into daily work.  

Often employees receive a single sustainability module when they join a company. It covers the basics, ticks a box, and rarely gets revisited. It also tends to look the same for everyone, regardless of role.  

As Luisa Esposito put it, learning needs to move people from awareness to action and that only happens when the content is specific, practical, and genuinely connected to the decisions someone makes every day. Generic training raises awareness. Relevant learning changes behaviour. An architect needs to understand the life cycle of materials. A procurement team needs to know how to evaluate supply chains. A finance manager needs to see how sustainability connects to risk.  

4. Leadership and collaboration are the engine  

Sustainability scales when leadership treats it as a real business priority with the budget, time, and accountability structures to match.  

Jussi Simolin pointed out that when leadership is genuinely committed, sustainability flows naturally into strategic planning, operative decisions, and team targets.  

He shared a standout example from the Finnish Learning Awards, where two major corporations built dedicated Procurement Academies. They were upskilling their procurement teams to make better decisions across the supply chain, in ways that served both commercial and sustainability goals at once.  

Sustainability challenges are interconnected, which means solutions need to be too. When HR, operations, finance, and sustainability teams learn together, shared understanding develops and accountability spreads. The ideas that emerge through collaboration tend to be better because they reflect more perspectives.  

You don’t have to solve everything at once. But you do have to involve more than one team.  

5. Adaptability and continuous learning defines the future  

When the panel was asked which skills will matter most for ESG-focused roles over the next decade, the answers pointed in the same direction.  

Luisa highlighted systems thinking: the ability to look beyond your own function and understand how environmental, social, and governance factors connect across an organisation. It’s the skill that turns a finance decision into a sustainability decision, without losing sight of either.  

Pippi pointed to adaptability and a continuous learning mindset. Sustainability knowledge is not static. Regulation evolves and science advances. What counts as best practice today may look different in three years. The professionals and organisations that thrive will be the ones that stay curious, stay humble, and keep developing.  

A transformation doesn’t happen overnight. It must start, for example with deliberate steps though a role-specific learning opportunity here, a cross-functional conversation there, a personal development goal that connects your daily work to something bigger.  
  
Underneath the main discussion it was also discussed on how leadership teams don’t yet believe soft, long-term investments produce measurable returns. Individual values also emerged as discussion point; personal scepticism about sustainability can derail projects from within. And perhaps most structurally, HR and ESG teams are still largely working in silos, which is a gap the whole conversation implicitly pointed to. 

Key takeaway: Skills for real impact   

Looking ahead, organisations have a clear opportunity to build stronger learning cultures that embed sustainability into how they operate, make decisions, and define impact. Those that invest in continuous learning and connect skills development to real business challenges will be best placed to drive long-term change.  

For individuals, this is also a moment to stay relevant by continuously developing the skills needed to navigate a changing sustainability landscape. Platforms like EIT Campus and Learnsy support flexible learning that fits into professional realities.  

Ultimately, when people understand ESG in practice, sustainability becomes part of everyday decision-making, leading to better choices, stronger collaboration, and more meaningful impact across organisations.  

Now is the time for organisations and professionals to move from intention to action by actively investing in the skills that turn sustainability ambition into practice. 

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