This is the third in a series of five posts exploring what 170 tourism SMEs across Europe reported in RESKILL survey about skills, training, and the future of work in hospitality.
Here’s something that surprised us in the survey data.
When we asked tourism businesses about their sustainability practices, the numbers were impressive. When we asked about green skills training, the numbers told a different story.
The Practice Side: Strong
European tourism SMEs are doing sustainability. The survey results show widespread adoption:
- Waste reduction and recycling: 118 mentions
- Reducing single-use plastics: 104 mentions
- Energy efficiency measures: 91 mentions
- Water conservation: 80 mentions
Only 6% of the businesses we surveyed aren’t implementing any green measures at all. That’s remarkable. The sector has seen transformative progress.
The Skills Side: Not So Much
Yet when we asked employers to rate the importance of different skill categories, green skills came in last:
- Soft skills average: 4.17 out of 5
- Digital skills average: 3.86 out of 5
- Green skills average: 3.54 out of 5
Poland showed the widest gap, rating green skills at just 2.94 out of 5 — while simultaneously reporting strong sustainability practices.
So what’s going on?
Doing vs Knowing
The pattern suggests something familiar: businesses are doing sustainability, but often without structured capability behind it.
They’ve installed LED lighting. They’ve switched suppliers. They’ve put up signs about towel reuse. These are good steps emerging from sensible actions taken practically, rather than being driven by strategic competence building.
What seems to be missing is sustainability culture built on systemic thinking: understanding resource flows, measuring impact, identifying improvements, communicating credibly to increasingly savvy customers.
In other words, businesses have adopted green practices without necessarily thinking a strategy to develop green capabilties, building up competencies and turning them into assets.
Why This Matters for Growth
It’s worth remembering the context: the data points that tourism and hospitality is not in an industry wide survival mode.
Over half the businesses we surveyed (53%) have fully recovered or are actively growing post-pandemic. Growing businesses face growing scrutiny — from customers, from regulators, from partners, from employees who care about these issues.
Tactical sustainability gets you started. But as expectations rise, strategic thinking needs to rise up to the challenge. Embedding sustainability thinking into how businesses operate introduces new ways of doing cost savings and improved resource efficiency. In simplest terms: doing better business.
That requires skills, not just intentions.
The Opportunity
Here’s the optimistic read: the hard part is already done.
These businesses aren’t resistant to sustainability. They’re already bought in. They’re already acting. What they need now is the capability layer — the skills to move from “we do some green things” to “we think green.”
That’s a training opportunity, not a persuasion problem.
RESKILL is developing green skills content that builds on this reality: not convincing businesses to care about sustainability, but helping them get better at something they’re already trying to do.
Practical. Applied. Meeting employers where they are.
Next in this series: The Time Trap — why time, not cost, is the real barrier to workforce training, and what that means for how we design learning.
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The RESKILL project (Reskill Revolution: Pioneering Change in Adult Education) is co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ programme. Survey data with responses from tourism SMEs in Finland, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, and Spain.
