Green Building Competences for the European Green Deal: A Knowledge Skills Attitudes Framework

Abstract

Green building is a practical pathway for meeting the European Green Deal objectives through lower life cycle impacts, healthier indoor environments, responsible material use, and improved resource efficiency across construction and renovation. This paper develops and characterises a competence framework for green building derived from the GreenSCENT competence framework materials. The framework is organised into four competence areas and twelve competences, each articulated through sets of knowledge, skills, and attitudes and mapped across European Qualifications Framework levels. The resulting framework contains 276 statements distributed across knowledge, skills, and attitudes, enabling curriculum design, formative assessment, and micro credential development for learners ranging from introductory to expert levels. Quantitative profiling highlights uneven density across competences, with project management and energy saving in buildings carrying the largest statement sets, indicating strong cross cutting requirements in governance and operational performance. The framework supports education and training that connects building design, material stewardship, technology selection, circular practices, and economic decision, making in a single competence logic aligned with Green Deal policy directions.

1. Introduction

The European Green Deal frames the transition to a climate neutral, resource efficient and competitive economy [1,2,3]. Buildings sit at the interface between climate mitigation, public health, affordability, and industrial transformation because they embody material flows, operational energy demand, land use patterns, and long lived infrastructure decisions [4,5,6]. Green building (GB) addresses this intersection through design and management practices that reduce environmental pressures across the life cycle, improve indoor environmental quality, and support circular material strategies [7]. These goals are not achieved through technology alone. They depend on competences that enable individuals and organisations to interpret performance criteria, select materials and products responsibly, plan and manage projects, evaluate trade-offs, and communicate with stakeholders [8]. Education and training are therefore part of the enabling conditions for the Green Deal. Competence frameworks help translate policy objectives into learnable outcomes and assessable performance [9]. They provide a common language for curricula, qualifications, and professional development, and they support mobility through alignment with the European Qualifications Framework [10]. This paper presents the GB competence framework subset expressed through knowledge, skills, and attitudes. The work is intentionally scoped to GB and excludes separate domains such as energy systems outside the building boundary. Because GB sits within a highly coupled socio-technical ecosystem, achieving Green Deal objectives requires competences that can anticipate and manage dynamic interactions (e.g., between design choices, project delivery, occupant practices, and regulatory/market constraints) rather than treating performance as a static target. Recent resilience engineering approaches, by representing how system functions unfold and resonate over time, offer a conceptual rationale for competence frameworks that foreground monitoring, trade-off reasoning, and adaptive coordination across the building life cycle [11,12]. GB is used here as an umbrella concept that includes resource efficient construction and renovation, low impact material selection, healthy indoor environments, durability and maintainability, and responsible end of life pathways for components and materials [13]. GB was used in this study as an operational umbrella concept that includes the broader notion of Sustainable Building. While the two terms are often used interchangeably, Sustainable Building generally refers to the integration of environmental, social and economic dimensions, whereas GB has traditionally focused more on environmental performance. In this framework, GB is adopted in a broad sense, consistent with the objectives of the European Green Deal, and therefore includes environmental, economic, and social aspects. Competence is treated as an integrated capability expressed through what a learner understands, what a learner can do, and what a learner is disposed to value and enact. The knowledge skills attitudes model supports this integration while preserving analytical clarity. Mapping to European Qualifications Framework levels provides a way to represent progression, from basic awareness and supervised practice to expert judgement and leadership. GB competences are inherently systemic. They require critical thinking about performance claims, awareness of supply constraints, familiarity with assessment methods, and the ability to work across disciplines [14]. They also require attitudes that support long-term stewardship, precaution in the face of uncertainty, and commitment to environmental and social objectives, including a consideration of economic sustainability, cost–benefit trade-offs, and resource efficiency. A competence framework that is explicit about these dimensions can support educational design that moves beyond declarative sustainability rhetoric and towards operational capability. It is important to clarify the relationship between the proposed competence framework and existing green building certification systems such as LEED, BREEAM, and DGNB. These systems focus on assessing building performance against defined sustainability criteria. The framework presented in this study does not aim to replace these certification schemes. Instead, it complements them by focusing on the competences required by individuals to achieve such performance. While certification systems define performance targets, the proposed framework specifies the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to interpret, implement and critically apply these standards in practice.

The proposed competence framework is aligned with key policy instruments supporting the European Green Deal, while maintaining a focus on education and competence development. In relation to the Renovation Wave initiative, the framework addresses competences relevant to the energy renovation of existing buildings, including energy efficiency, material selection, and project management, which are essential for large-scale retrofit interventions. The framework also relates to the New European Bauhaus by integrating environmental sustainability with broader considerations such as system thinking, user well-being, and interdisciplinary collaboration. While aesthetic and inclusiveness dimensions are not explicitly structured as separate competence areas, they are embedded within transversal competences and decision-making processes that consider social and environmental impacts [15]. Furthermore, the framework is conceptually consistent with the Level(s) framework for assessing the sustainability performance of buildings. Although it does not replicate Level(s) indicators, it supports the development of competences required to understand, apply, and interpret performance-based approaches across the building life cycle, including resource efficiency, environmental impacts, and operational performance. Overall, the framework is intended as an enabling layer that supports the implementation of European policy objectives by focusing on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required to translate these objectives into practice. This work was developed within the GreenSCENT project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101036480 [16]. The GreenSCENT competence framework can be explored at: https://publish.obsidian.md/greenscent/_START+HERE_ (accessed on 6 January 2026) (Supplementary Materials).

2. Materials and Methods

This study adopted a structured competence-based research design aimed at translating the objectives of the European Green Deal into an operational educational framework specifically focused on GB. Developing the competence framework within the project timeline required sustained, high intensity work over a constrained period. The research activities engaged 13 researchers, including 7 senior scholars and 6 doctoral candidates, organised into eight teams corresponding to the focus areas addressed by the Green SCENT project. The research team included expertise in sustainable building, structural and materials engineering, architecture, urban planning, environmental assessment, and education, combining academic research experience with practical involvement in European research projects and competence-based curriculum development. The work was conducted over approximately eleven months, from January to November 2022. Figure 1 presents the stages of the methodological process used to produce the competence framework.

2.1. Literature Review

Within the GreenSCENT project, multiple research teams collaborated, each focusing on a specific thematic area of the European Green Deal. Each team was responsible for developing competence frameworks related to its assigned focus area. In the present study, the work specifically addressed the GB focus area. At this stage, the teams worked mostly autonomously for organisational convenience, yet it is reasonable to assume that the process used to collect and structure the documentary corpus followed comparable steps across the different focus areas. For clarity, the corpus building procedure adopted for GB is described here. First, a scoping review was carried out with the purpose of acquiring an initial understanding of the domain and consolidating its key concepts and terminology, such as sustainable construction and renovation, building energy performance, energy and resource efficiency, indoor environmental quality, low impact and circular materials, and the assessment approaches used to substantiate GB claims. Consultation of competence frameworks developed by European institutions was helpful at this stage to support the definition of an appropriate conceptual boundary and a consistent vocabulary for competence-related outcomes. After acquiring sufficient familiarity with the relevant terminology, academic databases suitable for the investigated focus area were selected, and the search strategy was implemented using Scopus and ERIC. Appropriate queries were defined and kept sufficiently broad so as to not exclude potentially valuable documents at the outset. The literature search was conducted in November 2023 using the Scopus and ERIC databases. No explicit time range limitation was applied, in order to capture the evolution of the domain and avoid excluding potentially relevant contributions. The search strings were defined iteratively and included combinations of keywords related to green building, sustainable construction, energy efficiency, building materials, and competence development (e.g., “green building” OR “sustainable construction” AND “competence” OR “skills” OR “education” OR “training”). This approach inevitably led to the retrieval of a very large number of records for the GB focus area. Given such volume, a fully manual screening would have required an impractical amount of time, as even a steady screening pace would translate into several months of work, which was not compatible with the project schedule and with the subsequent need to elicit competences and their relations. For this reason, established Natural Language Processing methods were employed to support the management of the retrieved material [17,18,19,20,21]. The items in the documentary corpus were prioritised according to their relative relevance, and a reduced subset of documents was then selected for direct evaluation through critical reading. Given the large volume of retrieved records, Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques were used to support the screening process. In particular, topic modelling based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was applied to identify dominant themes within the corpus and to prioritise documents according to their relevance to the Green Building focus area. This approach enabled a systematic reduction in the dataset by highlighting semantically coherent clusters of documents. The initial retrieval resulted in approximately 2300 records. Following the NLP-based prioritisation and subsequent manual screening, a subset of approximately 180 documents was selected for detailed analysis. The final corpus used for competence elicitation was therefore derived through a combination of automated relevance assessment and expert judgement.

The documents assessed as most significant during the reading stage were retained and used as inputs for the subsequent competence framework elicitation phase.

The prioritisation of documents according to their relative relevance was based on a combination of automated analysis and expert judgement. Topic modelling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) was used to identify thematic clusters within the corpus, and documents were ranked according to their semantic proximity to core topics related to green building competences. This automated step was followed by manual screening conducted by members of the research team, who evaluated titles and abstracts to assess alignment with the scope of the study. Relevance was defined according to three main criteria: (i) explicit focus on green building, sustainable construction, or related domains; (ii) presence of competence-related elements (e.g., skills, knowledge, training, education, professional practices); and (iii) conceptual or empirical contribution relevant to the identification of competences. The screening process was carried out by multiple researchers, and decisions were based on consensus to reduce subjectivity. It is acknowledged that relevance assessment based on titles and abstracts may entail the risk of false negatives, potentially excluding relevant contributions not explicitly framed in competence-related terms. To mitigate this risk, the search strategy was intentionally kept broad, and the NLP-based clustering allowed for the identification of thematic groups beyond keyword matching, supporting the inclusion of documents that might not have been retrieved through strict query-based filtering.

The literature review was conducted as a structured scoping process rather than as a formal systematic review. Therefore, no standardised protocol such as PRISMA was adopted. The objective of the review was to support competence elicitation through a comprehensive yet flexible exploration of the domain, rather than to provide an exhaustive and fully reproducible synthesis of the literature.

2.2. Positioning with Existing European Competence Frameworks

The development of the Green Building competence framework was informed by existing competence frameworks developed at the European and international level. These frameworks were not adopted directly, but were consulted to ensure conceptual consistency, terminological alignment, and methodological robustness.

Among European frameworks, DigComp (Digital Competence Framework for Citizens) [22] and EntreComp (Entrepreneurship Competence Framework) [23] were considered as methodological references. In particular, the articulation of competences into knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSA) adopted in this study is consistent with the structure used in EntreComp, which emphasises competence as an integrated combination of cognitive, practical, and behavioural dimensions. However, unlike these general-purpose frameworks, which are domain-independent, the present work develops a domain-specific competence framework focused on the green building sector, embedding technical, environmental, and project-related competences within a single structure.

The European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) [24] classification was also considered as a reference for potential alignment with occupational profiles. While ESCO provides a comprehensive taxonomy of occupations and associated skills, it is primarily designed for labour market classification and matching. In contrast, the proposed framework focuses on competence development for education and training purposes. Therefore, rather than mapping directly to occupational categories, the framework organises competences around functional domains of green building practice, which can subsequently support alignment with ESCO if required.

In addition to these European frameworks, relevant competence-oriented initiatives in the construction and engineering domain were considered, including work by the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (CIB) [25] and continuing professional development requirements established by national professional bodies. These sources typically define professional standards or role-based competences, often focusing on regulatory compliance and technical performance. The present framework complements these approaches by providing a structured, education-oriented model articulated through knowledge, skills, and attitudes and mapped across European Qualifications Framework levels, enabling its use for curriculum design, assessment, and micro-credential development.

Overall, the incremental contribution of this research lies in the integration of domain-specific green building competences with a structured KSA model, EQF alignment, and a semantic layer based on tagging and knowledge graph representation. This combination supports both educational design and conceptual integration across competences, extending beyond existing frameworks that are either domain-general, occupation-based, or focused on performance assessment.

2.3. Conceptual Grounding in Resilience Engineering and FRAM

The conceptual development of the Green Building competence framework was informed by principles derived from resilience engineering, and in particular by the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) [26]. While FRAM was not applied as a formal modelling technique in this study, it provided an interpretative lens to guide the identification and structuring of competences.

FRAM conceptualises socio-technical systems as composed of interacting functions whose variability can resonate, leading to both expected and unexpected outcomes. In the context of green building, performance emerges from the dynamic interaction between design choices, material selection, technological systems, project management, and user behaviour. This perspective informed the decision to structure the framework around interconnected competence areas rather than isolated technical domains.

In particular, the identification of competence areas reflects a functional view of building processes. Transversal competences capture cognitive and integrative functions such as system thinking and critical reasoning, which are necessary to understand system variability and interdependencies. Materials and resources, and products and technologies represent operational and technical functions related to the transformation and use of resources. Economic literacy reflects coordination and decision-making functions that mediate trade-offs, constraints, and performance objectives across the building life cycle. These areas do not correspond to discrete FRAM functions, but rather to clusters of activities that contribute to system performance [27,28,29].

The articulation of competences through knowledge, skills, and attitudes is also consistent with a resilience-oriented perspective. Knowledge supports the understanding of system behaviour and potential variability; skills enable effective action and adaptation in practice; and attitudes reflect dispositions towards monitoring, anticipation, and responsible decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. This aligns with the need, emphasised in resilience engineering, to move beyond static compliance towards adaptive capacity and informed judgement.

Therefore, FRAM did not function as a prescriptive method for competence elicitation, but as a conceptual framework that supported a systemic interpretation of green building practice and informed the integration of technical, organisational, and behavioural dimensions within the competence model.

2.4. Competence Framework Elicitation

The documents that passed the stage described in Section 3.1 were used to construct a competence matrix for the GB focus area. The matrix was organised according to a common structure: the focus area was articulated into a set of competence areas, each of which was subdivided into individual competences. Each competence was specified through a short description and an associated set of keywords. The resulting first order matrix represents a literature grounded taxonomy in which competence areas are populated by competences derived from the scoping review and the subsequent screening of sources, as schematically illustrated in Figure 2.

2.5. Delphi Assessment

A Delphi study was initiated after the first draft of the GB competence framework had been produced. Delphi is an iterative expert consultation method designed to structure judgement under uncertainty by collecting qualitative input through open ended prompts and progressively refining the proposed content across successive rounds [30]. The purpose of the Delphi assessment was to validate and strengthen the GB framework by documenting and specifying competences in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes. During the process, partner experts were provided with the draft competence statements and asked to evaluate the proposed elements and submit comments on their clarity, relevance and completeness. The feedback collected at this stage guided the revision of the competence matrix. For the GB focus area, a dedicated consultation document was prepared to ask whether the proposed competences should be retained within a framework intended for online, open, technology supported education. Experts were also invited to propose revisions, reorganisation of competence areas, or the introduction of additional competences considered necessary for GB. When proposing structural changes or new competence areas, contributors were requested to specify how the suggested adjustment could be implemented, to support it with references to scientific or policy literature, and to provide draft competence formulations articulated as knowledge, skills and attitudes and aligned to European Qualifications Framework levels. Partner experts were also asked to rate the usefulness and quality of each competence, and they were given the possibility to reformulate competence descriptors and KSA statements where needed. Further methodological details on the composition of the expert panel and the Delphi process are provided in Appendix B. The articulation of competences into knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSA) follows established practice in competence-based education. In this study, knowledge is understood as conceptual and factual understanding, skills as the ability to apply and operationalise such knowledge in practice, and attitudes as dispositions that influence how individuals interpret and act upon sustainability-related challenges. It is acknowledged that several attitude statements may also express value orientations, intentions, or normative commitments (e.g., responsibility towards environmental protection or human health). In this context, attitudes are interpreted in a broad sense, encompassing cognitive, affective, and behavioural components that shape decision-making and professional conduct [31]. This interpretation is consistent with competence-based approaches that consider attitudes as integral to responsible action in complex socio-technical domains such as green building.

The alignment of competence statements with European Qualifications Framework (EQF) levels was developed through an interpretative mapping between the KSA structure adopted in this study and the EQF descriptors of knowledge, skills, and responsibility and autonomy (

Table 1. Mapping between EQF descriptors and KSA components in the Green Building competence framework.

EQF Level	EQF Core Descriptor (Simplified)	Knowledge Dimension (K)	Skills Dimension (S)	Attitudes Dimension (A—Responsibility & Autonomy)
1–2	Basic knowledge and simple tasks under supervision	Awareness of basic concepts and terminology	Ability to perform simple tasks with guidance	Following instructions, initial awareness of sustainability values
3–4	Factual and procedural knowledge; work under supervision with some autonomy	Understanding of materials, processes, and basic systems	Application of procedures in familiar contexts	Responsibility for own tasks, awareness of environmental impacts
5	Comprehensive, specialised knowledge; manage activities and adapt solutions	Understanding of interactions between systems and processes	Ability to solve problems and manage technical activities	Taking responsibility for outcomes, consideration of trade-offs
6	Advanced knowledge; manage complex activities and decision-making	Critical understanding of systems, methods, and performance criteria	Ability to analyse, evaluate, and optimise solutions	Responsibility for decision-making, coordination with others
7	Highly specialised knowledge; innovation and strategic decision-making	Integration of multidisciplinary knowledge and methods	Ability to develop new solutions and evaluate complex scenarios	High autonomy, leadership, accountability for performance
8	Frontier knowledge; create new knowledge and lead complex systems	System-level understanding and critical awareness of uncertainty	Ability to innovate and address complex, unpredictable problems	Strategic responsibility, ethical judgement, long-term vision

). While the KSA model distinguishes knowledge, skills, and attitudes, the EQF integrates knowledge and skills with increasing levels of responsibility and autonomy. In this study, attitudes are interpreted as contributing to the responsibility and autonomy dimension as they reflect dispositions influencing decision-making, accountability, and professional conduct. EQF level allocation was based on three main criteria: (i) the cognitive complexity of the statement (e.g., recall, application, evaluation), (ii) the complexity of tasks and problem-solving required, and (iii) the degree of responsibility, autonomy, and decision-making implied. As a result, some competence statements are associated with multiple EQF levels, reflecting their applicability across different stages of learning progression, from guided practice to independent professional performance.

This mapping provides a reference framework for interpreting how KSA statements are distributed across EQF levels, supporting the design of progressive learning pathways and assessment strategies.

2.6. Tagging

Following the previous steps, an information structure was developed for the GB focus area based on the documentary corpus assembled during the literature review [32]. Because the competence elicitation process required researchers to distil and formalise knowledge from heterogeneous sources, the resulting taxonomy risked becoming internally coherent yet weakly connected to adjacent conceptual domains that GB necessarily interacts with in practice. This compartmentalisation risk is commonly described as the information silos problem, where hierarchically organised knowledge remains enclosed and does not readily support integration across themes and contexts. To make the implicit semantic content of the competence framework more explicit and searchable, the competences were annotated with tags derived from the concepts identified during the reading and extraction stage. Tags were used as lightweight semantic markers that capture underlying topics, recurring constructs, and shared vocabulary across competences. The tagging process aimed to enable subsequent consolidation of equivalent or overlapping terms through standardisation, and to support the creation of coherent clusters of meaning that connect competences within the GB taxonomy. This semantic layer facilitates navigation across the framework and supports interpretability beyond the formal hierarchy of competence areas and competences. Tag collection, curation, and harmonisation were operationalised using the Obsidian (1.12.4 version) personal knowledge management environment, which supports systematic tag management and the construction of a folksonomy [33]. This approach enabled the development of a connected knowledge representation suitable for communicating relationships among competences and for supporting downstream educational uses. The resulting knowledge graph is described in the following section.

2.7. Knowledge Graph Construction

Human cognition relies heavily on visual pattern recognition and relational mapping. To provide European learners and stakeholders with an accessible representation of the competence matrices developed for the GB focus area, the matrix structure was translated into an aggregated knowledge graph. A knowledge graph can be defined as a knowledge base organised through a graph structured topology that supports data integration and navigation across connected concepts [34,35]. This form of representation supports the handling of complex information and helps reduce the compartmentalisation of content that can arise when knowledge is stored in rigid hierarchical structures.

2.8. Validation Workshops

The accessibility and usability of the knowledge graph developed for the GB competence framework were explored through a set of collaborative validation activities. These activities involved participants who had not taken part in the development of the framework and were intended to gather qualitative feedback on the clarity, structure, and interpretability of the competences and their relationships. The workshops combined guided exploration and open interaction with the knowledge graph, allowing participants to navigate the framework freely and reflect on the organisation of competences and their underlying connections. Feedback collected during these activities was used to refine the structure of the GB competence framework and to improve the coherence of the associated knowledge graph. Particular attention was given to the comprehensibility of the framework as an educational artefact and to the capacity of the graph to support bottom-up exploration and meaning making. The validation process provided qualitative insights that informed minor adjustments and supported the overall robustness of the framework.

3. Results

The first order GB matrix was structured into competence areas populated by competences derived from the literature review. Only the matrix for the GB focus area is reported below as an example, since discussing the full set of competences identified across multiple focus areas would expand the manuscript beyond a manageable length (

Table 2. Green Building competence areas and associated competence descriptors, presenting the hierarchical structure of the framework by grouping individual competences within broader areas and summarising the intended scope of each competence through its descriptor.

Competence Areas	Competence	Descriptor
1. Transversal	1.1 Sustainable Thinking	Identify, apply and promote the principles of sustainable development
	1.2 Critical Thinking	Assess and understand sustainability problems to become more responsible and create a more sustainable world
	1.3 System Thinking	Understand reality in relation to other contexts (local, nation, global) and fields (environment, social, economic, cultural)
2. Materials and resources	2.1 Natural resources	Extraction, processing, and application of natural resources in the fields of green building
	2.2 Reused and recycled materials	Collection, processing, and application of recycled materials in the fields of green building
	2.3 Artificial materials	Aggregation, processing, and application of artificial materials in the fields of green building
3. Products and technologies	3.1 Products used in GB	The knowledge and effect of different products in green building
	3.2 Technologies used in GB	Technological cycles used at different stages of green building implementation
	3.3 Energy efficiency in GB	Processes and technologies to obtain energy efficiency
4. Economic literacy	4.1 Energy saving in buildings	How do we obtain energy conservation and what is the effect of this
	4.2 Recycling effect	What can be realised by using recycling processes in circular economy
	4.3 Project management	Management and business development to foster plannings towards green building

). The detailed description of GB competences, including all knowledge, skills, and attitudes statements, is reported in Appendix A.

As an illustrative example of the framework structure, the competence matrix corresponding to Competence 2.2 Reused and recycled materials is reported (

Table 3. Green Building—Reused and recycled materials competence definition. The table presents the knowledge, skills and attitudes identified for this competence in the first column, the corresponding European Qualifications Framework levels in the second column, the descriptive KSA statements in the third column, and the associated keywords and tags in the remaining columns.

KSA	EQF	Statements	Keywords	Hashtag
Knowledge	3, 5, 6, 7	To know that in the process of building construction or building demolition, much waste of bricks, wood, and concrete is often produced. If these traditional building materials could be used again effectively, we can effectively reduce the construction site garbage and reduce the pollution of the environment	Waste/reuse	#recycled_materials #reusing
	5, 6, 7	To know that green concrete replacement material is a new energy-saving material, which has been widely used in the construction industry. The recyclable building material is a recycling of waste resources, providing an environmentally friendly solution for construction waste	energy-saving material	#energy_saving_materials
	5, 6, 7, 8	To know that diverse types of waste ranging from rice husk ash (RHA), sugarcane bagasse ash (SCBA), and bamboo leaves ash (BLA) among others have been identified as potent solutions in the development of sustainable construction materials	waste	#recycled_materials #reusing
	4, 5, 6, 7	To know that re-using nature-based waste helps not only to tackle the pollution problem brought about by the exploitation of conventional construction materials such as cement but also the environmental concern of disposing of the waste in landfills	reusing/waste	#recycled_materials #reusing
	4, 5, 6, 7	To know a broad range of construction materials, including brick/masonry elements, green concrete, insulation materials for buildings, reinforcement materials for buildings, particleboards, and bio-based plastics	construction/insulation	#green_building_materials #sustainability
	4, 5, 6, 7	To know that waste materials have also been deployed in thermal insulation—materials such as hemp, straw, coconut, wood, and flax were highly popular, while others such as sisal, reed, grass, and pineapple were rarely used	waste materials	#green_building_materials #sustainability
	3 to 8	To know how to deal with recyclable materials	recyclable materials	#recycled_materials #reusing
Skills	3	Ability to use waste materials for buildings (mainly wood, stone materials) that could be recycled in different ways: the utilisation ratio of recycled materials ranges from 15% to 90%	waste materials	#recycled_materials #reusing
	3, 6, 7	According to the essential requirements of green building materials, energy conservation should be embodied in the whole process of production, use and waste disposal of green building materials	energy conservation	#energy_saving
	6, 7, 8	Ability for waste materials to replace conventional construction materials and hence achieve economic, environmental, and social sustainability in the long run	sustainability	#sustainability
	5, 6, 7, 8	Collecting rainwater in GBs areas.	rainwater	#green_building_materials #sustainability
	6, 7, 8	Using minimal chemical emissions: Products that have minimal emission of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs).	VOC	#green_building_materials
	3, 6, 7, 8	Using product and systems that resist moisture or inhibit the growth of biological contaminants in building.	moisture resistance	#sustainability
Attitudes	3 to 8	Saving resources and minimising the use of existing energy and resources	energy/resources	#energy_saving
	5, 6, 7, 8	Using waste in developing construction materials helps tackle the sustainability challenge while reducing pollution and adverse environmental effects	pollution/environmental effects	#sustainability
	5, 6, 7, 8	Reusing the waste in manufacturing processes helps tackle the pollution challenge that arises from conventional disposal approaches such as dumping in landfills, incineration, and composting	waste/reusing	#recycled_materials #reusing
	5, 6, 7, 8	Materials and products made from waste materials, such as fly ash or wool, or a waste reduction technique, can be minimally packaged and covered in recyclable packaging, and locally refined and collected, which means less energy is used in extraction, storage, and transportation to the workplace	less energy	#energy_saving
	5, 6, 7, 8	GBs are designed to recycle and reuse various kinds of water, such as rainwater and grey water.	rainwater	#green_building_materials #sustainability
	4, 5, 6, 7	Rainwater harvesting, directly or indirectly, greatly reduces reliance on groundwater sources.	rainwater	#green_building_materials #sustainability
	4, 5, 6, 7	The collected rainwater can also be a source of regeneration of aquifers	rainwater	#green_building_materials #sustainability

). This matrix is presented to demonstrate how the identified competence is articulated through knowledge, skills and attitudes and how these elements are aligned with European Qualifications Framework levels. The example is intended to clarify the internal organisation of the GB competence framework rather than provide an exhaustive representation of all competences.

3.1. EQF Levels and KSA Identification

The European Qualifications Framework coverage of the GB competences is illustrated in Figure 3. Most competences span a broad range of EQF levels, reflecting the need for progressive learning pathways from basic awareness to advanced professional practice within the building sector. General competences and those related to products, technologies, energy efficiency, energy saving and recycling effects extend from EQF level 1 to level 8, indicating their relevance across the full educational spectrum, from early education to expert and leadership levels. In contrast, competences addressing natural resources, reused and recycled materials, artificial materials, and project management are positioned with a higher entry level, starting from EQF level 3. This reflects the assumption that these areas require prior foundational knowledge and a minimum level of technical or vocational preparation. The distribution shown in the figure highlights how GB competences combine transversal elements accessible at all levels with more specialised domains that demand progressively higher levels of qualification and responsibility.

The framework presents 276 statements distributed across knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Knowledge statements accounted for 95 items, skills for 89 items, and attitudes for 92 items. Figure 4 shows the distribution by competence. The largest statement sets occurred in project management and energy saving in buildings, reflecting the breadth of the managerial, technical and behavioural capabilities needed to deliver performance outcomes. Competences related to artificial materials and system thinking contained fewer statements, indicating a more concentrated scope. European Qualifications Framework coverage spanned levels 1 to 8 for most competences, with a subset beginning at level 3 reflecting an assumption of prior foundational learning for specialised material and project governance topics.

3.2. The Green Building Knowledge Graph

The Obsidian environment was used to manage the framework as a graph, making explicit the connections among GB competences through their associated tags (Figure 5). When a tag is shared by two or more competences, it signals the presence of an underlying topic that links those competences and supports thematic traversal across the taxonomy. During tag harmonisation, frequently recurring tags can be consolidated into broader topics to improve consistency and reduce redundancy. This consolidation is driven by the co-occurrence structure of the tags and emerges from the cumulative network of associations rather than from a purely manual, top-down reclassification.

4. Discussion

The results of the GB competence framework can be discussed by following the same internal articulation used to present them, moving from the structural organisation of competences to their qualification level distribution, semantic connectivity, and educational implications. The first-order competence matrix confirms that GB can be coherently represented through a limited number of competence areas while still capturing the complexity of the sector. The four competence areas identified provide a balanced coverage of transversal reasoning, material and resource stewardship, product and technology choices, and economic and managerial considerations. This structure reflects the reality of building practice, where performance outcomes emerge from the interaction of design intentions, material decisions, technological systems, and project level coordination rather than from isolated technical interventions. The competence descriptors show that GB knowledge extends beyond compliance-oriented understanding and requires the ability to interpret performance criteria, assess trade-offs, and integrate environmental objectives with functional and economic constraints.

The articulation of each competence through knowledge, skills, and attitudes highlights the multidimensional nature of capability development in the building sector. Knowledge statements capture the conceptual understanding of materials, technologies, and assessment approaches, while skills statements emphasise application, evaluation, monitoring, and optimisation across the building life cycle. Attitudes play a distinctive role by making explicit the value orientations that support responsible decision-making, such as commitment to resource conservation, attention to health and indoor environmental quality, and responsibility towards long-term impacts. The relative balance among these dimensions varies across competences, suggesting that some areas, such as energy saving and project management, demand a broader integration of cognitive, practical, and behavioural elements. This observation supports the interpretation that effective GB practice depends as much on judgement and coordination as on technical expertise.

The distribution of statements across competences provides further insight into the internal logic of the framework. Competences related to project management and energy saving in buildings contained the largest number of statements, indicating that these domains function as convergence points where multiple strands of GB knowledge and practice intersect. Project management emerged as a critical competence because it mediates between design intent and implementation, translating sustainability objectives into schedules, budgets, procurement choices, and stakeholder coordination. Energy saving in buildings similarly spanned design, technology selection, operation, and user behaviour, requiring continuous monitoring and adjustment rather than one time optimisation. In contrast, competences such as artificial materials or system thinking were more concentrated in scope, reflecting more specialised domains of application. This uneven density does not indicate imbalance but rather mirrors the differentiated roles that competences play within real-world building processes.

The mapping of competences to European Qualifications Framework levels reinforces the interpretation of GB as a field that supports progressive learning pathways. The broad EQF coverage of most competences reflects their relevance across educational stages, from early awareness to advanced professional practice. The higher entry level associated with material specific and project governance competences signals the need for prior foundational learning and contextual understanding before engaging with complex technical or managerial tasks. This pattern aligns with educational practice in the construction and building sector, where advanced decision-making is typically built on earlier exposure to basic concepts, tools, and site experience. The EQF mapping also enhances the usability of the framework for curriculum designers and training providers by making progression and differentiation explicit.

The semantic tagging and knowledge graph representation add a further interpretative layer to the results by exposing relationships that are not visible in the hierarchical matrix alone [36,37,38,39]. The emergence of shared tags across competences demonstrates that GB knowledge is organised around recurring themes such as energy performance, material circularity, water efficiency, assessment methods, health and well-being considerations, and resource management. These connections support integrative learning approaches and reduce the risk of compartmentalisation that often characterises technical education. The knowledge graph functions as a cognitive scaffold that enables exploration of the framework from multiple entry points, supporting both structured instruction and exploratory learning. This representation is particularly relevant for complex domains such as GB, where understanding develops through the recognition of patterns and interdependencies rather than through the linear accumulation of facts.

The integration of resilience engineering concepts, including those derived from FRAM, provides an additional interpretative layer for understanding the competence framework. By emphasising variability, interaction, and emergent performance, this perspective reinforces the need for competences that support monitoring, adaptation, and coordination across the building life cycle. This is particularly relevant in green building, where outcomes depend on the alignment of multiple actors, systems, and decisions rather than on isolated technical solutions.

While the proposed framework provides a structured representation of green building competences, it does not aim to offer an exhaustive coverage of all possible domains relevant to sustainable construction. The framework reflects a selective focus shaped by the objectives of the GreenSCENT project and by the need to develop a coherent and manageable competence structure. In particular, the framework prioritises the intersection of material use, technological systems, energy performance, and project-level decision-making, as these dimensions are central to the implementation of green building strategies within the European Green Deal context. As a result, some domains that are increasingly relevant in green building practice are only partially addressed or indirectly represented. These include, for example, indoor environmental quality in its full articulation (thermal, visual, acoustic, and air quality dimensions), advanced water management strategies (such as greywater and blackwater systems), biodiversity and ecosystem services, social aspects related to accessibility and community engagement, as well as digital competences related to simulation, parametric design, and smart building operation. Similarly, climate change adaptation competences, such as resilience to extreme weather events, are not explicitly structured within the current framework. These areas are not excluded in principle, but are only partially captured through broader competences related to materials, technologies, and system thinking. Their limited explicit representation reflects the need to balance comprehensiveness with clarity and usability in the development of an educational competence framework. Some degree of conceptual overlap between competence areas is intentional and reflects the systemic nature of green building. For instance, distinctions between natural resources, recycled materials, and artificial materials may become blurred in practice, particularly in the case of hybrid or processed materials. Rather than enforcing rigid boundaries, the framework is designed to allow for connections across domains, which are further supported by the semantic tagging and knowledge graph representation. The knowledge graph representation provides an additional interpretative layer that complements the tabular structure of competences. Rather than introducing a strict hierarchical classification, the graph highlights the relational nature of competences by making explicit the connections established through shared tags. In this sense, the value of the graph lies not in quantitative network metrics, but in its ability to reveal patterns of integration across domains. From this perspective, competences can be understood not as isolated units, but as nodes within a network of interdependencies linking materials, technologies, transversal skills, and decision-making processes. The presence of shared tags across different domains suggests that competences traditionally considered distinct are in practice interconnected. For example, system thinking competences may be linked to both material choices and technological solutions, while economic considerations intersect with environmental and technical aspects. The graph structure therefore supports a systemic interpretation of green building, where performance emerges from the interaction of multiple components rather than from individual competences. It also highlights potential bridging competences that connect different domains, facilitating interdisciplinary integration. At the same time, the absence of strictly separated clusters reinforces the idea that the four domains should not be interpreted as rigid categories, but as complementary perspectives within a broader competence ecosystem. In this sense, the knowledge graph can be seen as a tool to support competence integration, curriculum design, and the identification of cross-cutting learning pathways, rather than as an analytical model requiring formal network analysis.

In addition to the scope-related considerations discussed above, further limitations should be acknowledged in relation to sampling, timeliness, and validation depth. The expert consultation and validation activities were conducted within the context of the GreenSCENT project and primarily involved participants from specific European contexts. While the panel included a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, the geographic distribution may not fully capture the variability of building traditions, regulatory environments, and climatic conditions across Europe. As a result, the applicability of the framework to regions with different construction practices or environmental conditions, such as Northern or Eastern Europe, may require further contextualisation. A second limitation concerns the dynamic nature of the construction sector. The framework is based on a documentary corpus and expert consultation conducted within a defined time frame, and therefore reflects the state of knowledge and practice at that moment. However, the domain is characterised by rapid technological and methodological evolution, including developments such as mass timber construction, digital fabrication, and AI-assisted design processes. While the framework is structured to capture underlying competences that are not tied to specific technologies, its continued relevance would benefit from periodic updates to incorporate emerging practices and innovations. Finally, the validation activities focused primarily on the clarity, coherence, and interpretability of the competence framework as an educational artefact. They did not systematically address aspects such as the completeness of the competence set, the feasibility of implementing the framework within existing educational programmes, or its predictive validity in terms of professional performance. These aspects represent important directions for future research, particularly in relation to empirical testing in educational and professional contexts.

Future developments of the framework may expand its scope to include a more detailed articulation of these domains or may reorganise competences according to alternative logics, such as building life cycle stages or professional roles. In its current form, however, the framework is intended as a focused and operational tool that captures key competences at the intersection of materials, technologies, and decision-making processes in green building. A further aspect concerns the assessability of competence statements articulated through knowledge, skills, and attitudes. While the KSA structure provides a clear organisational framework, the degree to which individual statements can be directly observed and assessed varies across the framework. In particular, a substantial proportion of knowledge statements are expressed at a declarative level (“to know that”), which captures factual awareness but does not always make explicit procedural (“know how”) or explanatory (“know why”) dimensions. Similarly, some skill statements describe high-level capabilities, such as system-level reasoning or interdisciplinary collaboration, which may be difficult to operationalise into observable and measurable performance indicators without further specification. Attitudes present an additional challenge, as they represent dispositions that influence behaviour rather than directly observable actions. The framework explicitly recognises the importance of value-based orientations, such as responsibility towards environmental and social outcomes, but does not fully specify the mechanisms through which these attitudes are translated into practice. This reflects a broader challenge in competence-based education, where the relationship between attitudes, decision-making, and behaviour is mediated by contextual, organisational, and situational factors. For these reasons, the present framework should be interpreted as a conceptual and structural model rather than as a complete assessment system. Its effective use in educational and professional contexts would benefit from the development of complementary tools that translate KSA statements into observable learning outcomes and performance criteria. These may include rubrics, scenario-based assessments, performance tasks, and simulation-based evaluations that make explicit the link between knowledge, action, and decision-making. Future research may therefore focus on the operationalisation of competences into assessable units, including the differentiation of cognitive levels within knowledge statements, the definition of behavioural indicators for skills, and the identification of conditions that support the translation of attitudes into practice. Such developments would strengthen the applicability of the framework for curriculum design, assessment, and professional training.

The distribution of competence statements across domains, as illustrated in Figure 3 and Figure 4, can be interpreted in multiple ways. While the higher number of statements in areas such as energy saving and project management may reflect their cross-cutting role in green building practice, alternative explanations should also be considered. For instance, this pattern may partly reflect biases in the existing literature, where energy performance and project management are more extensively studied and standardised compared to areas such as material innovation or ecosystem-related competences. Similarly, the composition of the expert panel and the disciplinary backgrounds involved in the framework development may have influenced the relative emphasis on certain domains. In addition, the uneven distribution of statements may indicate different levels of maturity across competence areas. Domains with a higher number of statements may correspond to areas where knowledge and practices are more consolidated, whereas domains with fewer statements may reflect emerging or less formalised fields, where competences are still evolving. With regard to the EQF distribution, the fact that some competences are defined starting from level 3 does not imply that lower-level learners cannot engage with these topics. Rather, it reflects the assumption that a minimum level of conceptual or technical understanding is required for their full articulation within the framework. At the same time, introductory exposure to these topics at earlier stages remains both possible and desirable, particularly in the context of early STEM education. In this sense, the EQF mapping should be interpreted as indicative of expected levels of autonomy and responsibility, rather than as a strict limitation on when learning can begin.

Taken together, the results indicate that the proposed framework offers a robust basis for education and training aligned with Green Deal objectives while remaining grounded in the realities of building practice. By combining structured competence areas with a semantic layer that supports connectivity, the framework addresses both clarity and flexibility. It provides a shared reference for educators, trainers, and policy stakeholders while allowing for adaptation to different institutional contexts and learner profiles. While the KSA structure provides a clear and widely adopted framework for organising competences, some limitations should be acknowledged in terms of granularity and pedagogical structuring. In particular, the distinction between knowledge, skills, and attitudes may not fully capture differences in cognitive complexity or levels of performance. For example, skill statements in the framework range from basic application to more advanced capabilities involving analysis, evaluation, and system-level reasoning.

In this regard, complementary educational taxonomies such as Bloom’s taxonomy or Miller’s pyramid could provide additional structure by differentiating levels of cognitive and professional performance (e.g., from knowing to doing). Similarly, the interpretation of attitudes may benefit from a more explicit distinction between cognitive, affective, and behavioural components. In the present study, attitudes are treated as broad dispositions guiding responsible action, but further refinement could enhance their operationalisation for assessment purposes. A further limitation concerns the dependence on a predefined document corpus. The competence framework was derived from materials developed within the GreenSCENT project, which provided a structured and coherent knowledge base for competence elicitation. However, this approach may introduce a bias of origin, as the identified competences reflect, at least in part, the structure and focus of the analysed documents rather than the full spectrum of skills required in green building practice. This may also result in an incomplete representation of emerging or rapidly evolving topics, such as advanced life cycle assessment methods, digital twins, or new generations of bio-based materials, which may not be fully captured within the selected corpus. While the integration of expert judgement partially mitigates this limitation, further expansion of the framework through additional data sources and sectoral validation could enhance its comprehensiveness. Other limitations concern the process of reconstructing competence statements from the source material. In order to ensure consistency and educational readability, some statements were reformulated, synthesised, or adapted from the original sources. While this process was necessary to produce a coherent framework, it inevitably introduces a degree of subjective interpretation by the researchers. In addition, the transformation of source content into KSA statements does not always allow for full traceability between the original formulation and the final statement, and a formal protocol distinguishing between derived, adapted, and synthesised statements was not systematically implemented. Future developments of the framework could address this aspect by introducing more explicit procedures for documenting the transformation of source materials, including traceability mechanisms and validation protocols, in order to strengthen reproducibility and support empirical validation.

These aspects are considered as directions for future development, particularly in the context of curriculum design and competence assessment, where a more fine-grained classification could support the alignment between learning outcomes, teaching methods, and evaluation strategies.

The emphasis on knowledge, skills, and attitudes supports assessment approaches that go beyond declarative learning and capture performance in realistic scenarios. In this way, the framework contributes to strengthening the human capacity required to implement GB strategies at scale, supporting the transition from policy ambition to effective action within the built environment. The present study adopted a defined system boundary by focusing on competences related to the building itself and explicitly excluding energy systems outside the building boundary. This delimitation was necessary to maintain conceptual clarity and to ensure a manageable scope for competence identification. However, it is important to acknowledge that in practice, the boundary between building-internal systems and external energy networks is increasingly blurred. Technologies such as heat pumps, building-integrated photovoltaics, and smart control systems operate at the interface between buildings and wider energy infrastructures, including district heating, electricity grids, and renewable energy systems.

This increasing integration suggests that future competence frameworks may need to explicitly address the interaction between buildings and external energy systems, particularly in the context of energy flexibility, demand response, and grid integration. While the present framework provides a structured foundation focused on the building scale, its practical application would benefit from further extension towards system-level competences that capture these interactions. This limitation does not undermine the internal coherence of the framework, but rather indicates a direction for future development aligned with the evolving nature of the built environment.

5. Conclusions

This paper set out to translate the objectives of the European Green Deal into an operational competence framework focused on GB, structured through knowledge, skills, and attitudes and aligned with European Qualifications Framework levels. The main result is a coherent and internally consistent framework composed of four competence areas and twelve competences articulated through 276 statements, which together describe what learners and professionals need to understand, be able to do, and be willing to enact in order to contribute effectively to GB practices. The findings respond directly to the research questions by showing that GB competences are inherently systemic, spanning technical, managerial, and value-based dimensions, and that they require progression across qualification levels rather than being confined to a single stage of education or training. The analysis highlights that project management and energy saving in buildings function as integrative competences where environmental performance, economic constraints, and governance responsibilities converge, indicating that delivery capacity is as critical as technological knowledge. The use of semantic tagging and a knowledge graph demonstrates that competences are connected through recurring themes that support interdisciplinary learning and reduce fragmentation, reinforcing the suitability of the framework as both an educational and communicative artefact.

From an application perspective, the framework provides clear take home messages for education, training, and policy. It offers a practical reference for curriculum design, assessment development, and micro-credential construction across formal education, vocational training, and continuing professional development. By making competence progression explicit through EQF mapping, it supports comparability, mobility, and the stackability of learning pathways within the European context. For policy and sector stakeholders, the framework clarifies the human competences required to move from regulatory and strategic objectives to implementation in design, construction, and building operation. The study is subject to some limitations, as the framework is derived from a defined documentary corpus and reflects the scope and granularity of the available source materials, with some statements reconstructed to ensure educational usability. These limitations do not undermine the internal coherence of the framework but point to future developments, including empirical validation in educational settings, refinement through sector specific case studies, and extension to additional building typologies or regional contexts. Future work may also explore integration with digital learning environments and performance based assessment tools. Further research may also explore the cross-cultural applicability of the framework by testing its relevance and adaptability across different European contexts, considering variations in building traditions, regulatory environments, and climatic conditions. Longitudinal studies could provide additional insights into the effectiveness of the framework by assessing its impact on learning outcomes and professional performance over time. In addition, the rapid evolution of technologies in the construction sector suggests the need for dynamic updating mechanisms, enabling the framework to incorporate emerging practices such as digital design tools, advanced materials, and data-driven building management. Future developments of the framework may also integrate digital competences relevant to the AEC sector, including data-driven approaches, real-time monitoring systems, and advanced digital tools such as BIM, digital twins, and AI-based applications. This would support the alignment of the framework with the growing importance of digital green skills in the ecological transition.

Taken together, the results indicate that the proposed GB competence framework represents a transferable and actionable contribution to capacity building for the Green Deal, supporting the alignment of education, professional practice, and sustainability objectives in the built environment.