Skills for Planet Training
Upskill your organisations with green design skills for the future.
Our Skills for Planet Training helps your team understand green design skills, apply them in practice and identify where to build green design capabilities across your organisation.
Sessions are delivered by our Skills for Planet trainers, who bring expertise from across a range of design disciplines and regions of the UK. We match you with the trainers best suited to your organisation’s context and needs.
The sessions can all be hosted in-person at your own offices or online, and we offer discounted rates for SMEs and charities, helping to make the training accessible to all types of organisations.
We currently don't offer training to individual designers. However, you can sign up to let us know if you'd be interested in paying for individual training in the future, and to receive our Skills Bulletin so you’ll be the first to know if we introduce this as an offer further down the line.
Explore the options
Introduction to the Skills for Planet Blueprint
This session introduces you to our Skills for Planet Blueprint, outlining the key skills and mindsets your team needs to confidently design for planet, be equipped for future work, and meaningfully contribute to the green transition.
Our trainers contextualise the skills in real life case studies to help you better understand how they work in practice, and run through a series of useful actions and resources that you can use to embed the green design skills into your organisation.
What you'll gain:
- Knowledge of the critical green design skills needed to design for planet.
- An accessible jumping off point for practical application of these skills into everyday work.
- A suite of resources and actions to accelerate the integration of green skills across your organisation.
Format: 1 hour, in-person or online
Skills in Action: Co-design workshop
This workshop helps your team build confidence in applying green design skills to real-world challenges, guiding them through a design sprint using our Double Diamond Framework.
During this sprint, your team will reframe a relevant challenge into a design brief through a green design lens, and then co-design solutions for it, gaining valuable experience of applying the green design skills in practice.
What you’ll gain:
- A shared language and process for your team to apply green skills across your work
- A suite of resources and actions to accelerate the integration of green skills across your organisation
- Strengthened co-design capabilities across the team
Format: 3 hours, in-person or online
Mapping Your Skills Journey: Skills Audit Workshop
This workshop helps your team understand where you are on your green design skills journey, introducing the key green design skills needed to design for planet before helping your team assess your current collective capabilities. You’ll identify which skills you might want to focus on improving first. Where do you have the most agency to make change? Which skill areas they feel most confident in? Which areas might need additional attention?
Each participant will be supported to create an upskilling action plan that they can take away and implement.
What you’ll gain:
- A shared baseline understanding of your current green design skills strengths, gaps and leverage points
- Alignment on clear next steps for further skills developments
- A suite of resources and actions to help your team continue its green design upskilling journey.
Format: 3 hours (flexible), in-person or online.
Bespoke green design training
This offer is co-designed with you. We work with you to develop a session or programme that is the right length and focus for your needs, digging into the areas of the Skills for Planet Blueprint most relevant to you, and using a variety of our tools and frameworks to train participants in how to apply them in practice.
This enables design teams to develop green design capability across your organisation that is deeply aligned to your context, challenges, and ambitions.
What you’ll gain:
- Increased confidence across your team to apply the green design skills to live projects and create long-term cultural change
- In-depth understanding of each of the green design skill areas
- Cross-team knowledge on how to apply a variety of our tools and frameworks to help you embed green design across all your work
Meet the Trainers
All of our Skills for Planet Trainers have been selected from our network of 250 Design Council Experts. Combined, their knowledge spans many different design disciplines, and they are based all across the UK. This means there is a trainer with the relevant expertise and contextual knowledge for almost all design organisations across the UK.
We work with you to identify which of the trainers we believe would be best suited to deliver training for your organisation. Click on any of their headshots below to find out more about them.
Alexie Sommer
Architecture & Built Environment | Graphic Design, Visual Communication | Strategic Design, Design Innovation
Alicia Storie
Interior Design, Performance Design | Service, Experience & UX Design
Cory Hughes
Digital & AIService, Experience & UX Design | Strategic Design, Design Innovation
Harbinder Birdi
Architecture & Built Environment | Design Academic, Educator | Public Infrastructure
Karishma Kusurkar
Arts | Design Academic, Educator | Strategic Design, Design Innovation
Kathryn Firth
Architecture & Built Environment | Design Academic, Educator | Urban Design, Landscape Design, Green Infrastructure
Kyle Soo
Service, Experience & UX Design | Strategic Design, Design Innovation | Systemic Design, Policy Design
Laura Melissa Williams
Speculative Design, Futures Design | Strategic Design, Design Innovation | Systemic Design, Policy Design
Louise Goodison
Architecture & Built Environment | Strategic Design, Design Innovation | Urban Design, Landscape Design, Green Infrastructure
Nat Hunter
Design Academic, Educator | Digital & AI | Product, Industrial & Packaging Design
Ned Gartside
Service, Experience & UX Design | Strategic Design, Design Innovation | Systemic Design, Policy Design
Phil Holton
Design Academic, Educator | Product, Industrial & Packaging Design | Strategic Design, Design Innovation
Ruth Wassermann
Product, Industrial & Packaging Design | Service, Experience & UX Design and Strategic Design | Design Innovation
Simeon Shtebunaev
Architecture & Built Environment | Design Academic, Educator | Systemic Design, Policy Design
Tara Hanrahan
Design Academic, Educator | Graphic Design, Visual Communication | Strategic Design, Design Innovation
Skills for Planet
Upskilling one million designers and commissioners in green design skills by 2030.
Work with us
Use design to unlock opportunities, solve complex challenges and grow capability.
Design for Planet
This is our mission and a call to action to put the planet at the heart of design.
Better business by design
Five ways leading businesses are harnessing design to solve business problems.
Support us
As the UK’s national charity for design and its critical role in effecting change, we need your help.
