Girls in Green Futures
A five-day work experience programme where participants don't learn about project management — they do it, on a project that matters: their own school's Climate Action Plan.
What it is
The transition to Net Zero is the largest infrastructure transformation in history — and it runs on skills most young people have never been shown: scope, schedule, cost, risk, reporting, governance. Girls in Green Futures teaches exactly those skills, in one week, by handing participants a real project with a real client: a structured review of their school's Climate Action Plan, presented back to school leadership on day five.
Developed by The Novacene with an industry partner in energy and infrastructure, the programme is delivered as online modules with live facilitation — and everything participants produce is a working document the school keeps.
The eight modules
| Module | What participants do |
|---|---|
| 1 · Systems architecture | Discover the ten functions every system needs — family, school, government, project — and the careers behind each one. |
| 2 · Scope & schedule | Define what the project covers, guard against scope creep, and build a real schedule with dependencies. |
| 3 · Estimating & cost | Resource-load the schedule, build a cost estimate, and learn what to do when the numbers go wrong. |
| 4 · Risk | Identify, score and plot risks on a matrix; build a living risk register; respond to a live scenario. |
| 5 · Reporting & KPIs | Design SMART KPIs and a RAG dashboard the school will actually use after the week ends. |
| 6 · Green skills & future jobs | Map the skills they've just used onto the fastest-growing careers in the Net Zero economy. |
| 7 · Project governance | Write a Terms of Reference and RACI so the plan gets implemented, not filed; practise structured decision-making. |
| 8 · Presentation & close | Build, rehearse and deliver a 25–30 minute presentation of their findings to the school. |
What participants leave with
- A genuine portfolio: scope statement, schedule, cost estimate, risk register, KPI dashboard, Terms of Reference and RACI — all real, all used.
- A working vocabulary of careers they'd never been shown: project manager, cost manager, planner, risk analyst, quantity surveyor, project controls analyst, stakeholder manager.
- Entry and exit knowledge assessments evidencing measurable progress.
- The confidence of having presented real findings to a real audience.
What the school keeps
A reviewed Climate Action Plan with KPIs, a dashboard, and a governance structure for implementation. The programme's legacy is built in: findings come with accountability, so the plan moves rather than sits in a drawer.
For employers and partners
The programme is designed to generate a quantifiable, verifiable social value evidence pack — making it a natural fit for organisations with social value commitments in tenders and community investment in their pipeline.