9

Jan

New Decade, New Decision- Making a VERI small difference to the carbon footprint in training.

Category : Ann Marie McSorley, Blog

Yesterday at the Pendulum Summit, a hero of mine management guru Stephen Covey expressed the need for agility for change in business in the new data driven world. His analogy was that it would no longer be the big fish eating the little fish, but the fast fish eating the slow one. 

Over twenty years working in training I have seen the mandatory compliance data and how people are locked into a paper process. this process  makes no sense with duplication, no transparency and lack of access to vital data. And of course, no time stamps or verification. 
There was also an issue for me around the tens of thousands  of sheets of paper used fulfilling training compliance. A one year QQI accredited ETB  training programme for 20 people could take up to 50,000 sheets of paper. If you take a contracted trainer with 19 programmes,  because of the required paper trail, they could generate up to 850,000 sheets of A4 paper annually.

Over 10 years that translates to huge administration costs, paper storage but also alarmingly; 

  • 2,500 trees
  • 56,000 gallons of oil
  • 450 cubic yards of landfill space
  • 595,000 KW (kilowatts) of energy

(Data Source: www.epa.gov)

So as Greta Thunburg says,

“no one is too small to make a difference”. 

For the new decade we decided to partner with a fantastic Environmental Training Agency Envirico and have now got  involved in supplying tools to help the Environment Right Now! Envirico as environmental partners consults nationwide and is viewed as a leader of community and field based learning. Evirico are also a Lantra Certified Training Body.
The first of our joint projects using the Veri dashboard is South Tipperary Development Association’s Water Biodiversity Programme. Experts from their 11 strong team of environmentalists will be Training in Citizen Science: Water Quality Monitoring and Community Action in Invasive Species Control. 
Our role will be verifying the training. We will be digitally bench marking skills. We will simultaneously communicating with the 40 strong communities’ participants and giving them online access to their learning and progression. Really importantly, our data capture can be visualised to then  embed the citizen science research and monitoring data into beautiful graphics dashboards, to tell the story that we all know needs to be heard. We are about to announce a second larger project and we are excited.  Like Covey said to be ready for the Tsunami ! 
Verifying quality training and reducing paper while communicating digitally and collecting data in the cloud, our new partnership brings an eco- innovative approach that we can share with our clients for the New Decade. If your Corporate Social Responsibility defines reducing your Carbon Footprint or like us, as an SME your conscious just makes you want to do one small thing, give us a call today! 
https://vericonnect.ie/contact/