Senem Altan, Mustafa Kemal Topçu
The green transition is shaping the production and employment structure of economies in Turkey and placing universities at the forefront of developing the green workforce of the future. This development brings to the fore the question of how universities define their capacity to develop green skills and how they incorporate this into strategic priorities. It is becoming a strategic necessity for higher education institutions to take on more distinct, measurable, and policy-aligned roles in relation to the green workforce. This study aims to analyse the role of universities in developing the green workforce in Turkey through official strategic planning documents and, in this regard, provides a complementary framework to sustainability studies focused on strategic intentions. The research was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, six universities ranked highly in the UI GreenMetric (2024) and THE Impact Rankings (2024/2025) lists were selected. In the second stage, the current strategic plans of these universities were examined by reviewing relevant documents in line with the themes of governance, curriculum and microcertificates, university-industry-public partnerships, and monitoring and evaluation (KPI). The findings show that in strategic plans, green workforce and sustainability-focused targets are mostly embedded within corporate capacity, entrepreneurship, and collaboration rhetoric, fragmented, and insufficiently supported by measurable indicators; while in the curriculum and microcertification dimension, a systematic competency framework is rarely defined. Consequently, it is revealed that while the universities examined have high potential to support the green workforce, their strategic plans have limited capacity to translate this potential into performance-oriented policies.