About localenvironmentskills.org
Localenvironmentskills.org is an outcome of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ commitment to help local authorities to achieve improvements in local environmental quality. The concept is about enabling better and more efficient street cleansing and related services through boosting key skills, including awareness, community engagement and through utilising relevant enforcement powers.
Sector Skills experts have mapped the skills needed for managing and delivering local environmental services at every level, which are matched with training opportunities.
This website helps you to analyse what you do in your current job, identify areas for improvement to help you do your current job better or to move up the career ladder, and matches these areas with learning or training opportunities. It is very straightforward, and can be done with or without the knowledge of your line manager.
Localenvironmentskills.org has been designed for three types of audience:
- Employers who wish to develop the skills of their workforce
- Individuals wanting to improve their own performance at work, and perhaps looking to find out what is required of them to make that next step in their career
- Training and skills providers who have services to offer to the local environmental management sector
Who is Involved?
Defra’s Local Environmental Protection Team has drawn on the experience of several organisations to ensure that localenvironmentskills.org achieves its objectives. Partners include:
- ENCAMS
- Asset Skills
- IDeA
- LGA
- WAMITAB
- Institute of Managers
- CIWM
- APSE
- JGP
What is Local Environmental Management?
Local Environmental Management (LEM) is a collective term for all of the functions undertaken by local authorities and other land owners and land managers that have an impact upon the quality of the physical environment, referred to here as local environmental quality, or LEQ.
Some of the core functions of LEM are street cleansing and other street scene operations that tackle issues such as litter, graffiti and fly-tipping.
Other functions that impact upon local environmental quality include grounds maintenance, highways management, planning, and estate management. The impact of these functions on LEQ is often indirect, but by co-ordinating these with street cleansing, service efficiencies and improvements can be made.
Developing localenvironmentalskills.org
localenvironmentskills.org provides learning opportunities from a number of sources. Initially these will be aimed towards core activities such as street cleansing, education and enforcement.
Localenvironmentskills.org will continuously evolve to promote the most up-to-date and relevant skills and training opportunities for you. This will include expanding the service areas covered to include support for the likes of Highways Maintenance, Planning and Estate Management.
How to use the website
This site incorporates a mechanism enabling us to identify your current role and its associated tasks.
Start by using the “Skills Diagnostic Tool”, which will work out the skills that you require to do your job effectively and the skills that you require to take that next step on the career ladder. Once we have a list of your skill requirements, we will identify some of the training and development opportunities that are relevant to you and provide content descriptions and contact details for you to evaluate further.
If you are a manager, use this tool to develop the skills of your staff, as well as your own skills.
As well as providing relevant learning and skills opportunities for you, the Skills Diagnostic Tool also identifies where there are gaps in training provision regionally and nationally. This will enable Government to work with training providers to develop further opportunities for this sector. This process is critical to the success of localenvironmentskills.org and we hope to involve you in ensuring that the gaps are covered effectively as possible.
