Demand for upskilling professionals is growing from the UAE and regional companies in the field of sustainability as organisations have to source talent from abroad, industry executives said at a conference on Wednesday.
“We’re seeing an increase in the demand for upskilling professionals about sustainability literacy first and foremost, and that’s across the board with all levels of the workforce. This starts with engineers who need to understand more about renewable energy, the finance teams who need to understand green finance principles, and then the leaders who need to be able to make climate-conscious business decisions,” said Fazeela Gopalani, partner at EY Academy Mena, during a panel discussion at the Journey to Net Zero – UAE 2025 conference.
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Organised by the UAE’s first English daily Khaleej Times, the conference is a premier climate action gathering, attending by senior public and private officials across various walks of life. The fourth edition conference provided insights into various aspects of the regulatory framework, green financing, and ESG compliance.
Moderated by Ivano Iannelli, managing director and chief sustainability officer, Green Economy Partnership (GEP), Yohaan Cama, corporate ESG and sustainability lead, Gems Education, also took part in the panel discussion.
“Organisations are coming forward and seeking help, saying we’ve made a commitment to the net zero strategies and need support on upskilling our professionals. Firms have to invest in the people, because that’s only way to change from something on paper to an actionable outcome across the organization and across the board. That’s where training is bridging that gap to move towards making it an actionable outcome for organizations,” Fazeela said during the conference.
She stressed that organisations have to invest in their people to see a real change. “There is a major need for this in this region. We see organisations are hiring from abroad to get people into teams who have that knowledge of sustainability. But we’ve got people in this room and in this region. So what are we doing? It’s your commitment to upskill your professionals and support them across all functions,” she told the attendees.
Fazeela elaborated that there is a demand from big institutions in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, like sovereign wealth funds and energy firms, to upskill their teams.
Yohaan Cama said each of the group’s schools is a unique challenge.
“We’re also learning as we build strategies, like implementing solar across all our schools is now a mandate. Every new school that we come up with has a certain design and performance requirements. So we are pushing from the concept stage all the way into operations. Once we go into retrofitting, we have a checklist and a framework around that as well, because some of our schools are 40, 50, 60 years old. So we have to be very mindful because schools hold a very sentimental value, and you don’t want to change it too much, or move out of an asset, or move to another location. It might sound easier than it is, but there’s a lot of memories that are related to it. So we have to be very mindful of how we move ahead, and that’s what we’re trying to unlock,” Yohaan said during the panel discussion.
Gems Education operates over 45 schools and more than 4,000 buses across its portfolio.
While speaking about creating a climate smart balance sheet and incentivising greener and more resilient financial activity in the UAE, Dr Waseem Hoeneini, managing partner at WMSJ, said that finance is the fuel of the future and the future is green.
“We have to invest in a greener future,” he said, adding that steps are being taken in different sectors, but there is a need to take it to the next step.
“The question is, why in most cases, sustainability initiatives are failing because we are not taking it as a real business model,” he said.
He pointed out that the top challenges in the carbon market are a lack of standardized evaluation frameworks, reputation risk, poor data transparency, fragmentation, and a lack of high quality supply.
