Studies show green skills are needed to accomplish climate pledges and aid hiring
In our newsletter last month, we published an overview of the state of the green jobs industry, with the main takeaway being that green jobs are becoming an increasingly common faction of nearly all industries. The Department of Energy estimates that nearly 40% of energy jobs are net-zero aligned, which is to be expected in a sector facing such large decarbonization goals. However, all industries― including less obvious suspects― are seeing a push towards increasing green jobs, or jobs requiring green skills, in their hiring practices. This is mostly due to climate pledges made by companies large and small, and involved hiring non-traditional green roles like supply chain managers, product buyers, or green marketers.
With green jobs seeing a high projected growth rate in select industries over the next ten years due to government investment in both the public and private sectors, governments and employers need to begin seriously considering the accompanying ‘green skills’ needed to complete energy transition and decarbonization goals across sectors and industries.
In February of this year, LinkedIn released their Global Green Skills Report 2022, highlighting key employment trends gathered from data on the professional networking site. In this report, the company defined several key terms that will be used for the purposes of this article:
Green skills: are those that enable the environmental sustainability of economic activities
Green jobs: are those that cannot be performed without extensive knowledge of green skills
Greening jobs: are those that can be performed without green skills, but typically require some green skills
Greening potential jobs: are those that can eb performed without green skills but occasionally require come level of green skills
Non-green jobs: are those that do not require green skills to be performed
Green talent: a LinkedIn member who has explicitly added green skills to their profile and/or are working in a green or greening job
Slightly vague descriptions aside, these definitions, and the associated analysis performed on data from LinkedIn’s nearly 875 million worldwide users, provide interesting insights into the future of climate pledged, decarbonization strategies, and the near-certain change that must occur in the workforce if stated goals are to be met.
According to the report, in 2019 the “green hiring rate accelerated ahead of the overall hiring rate in most economies around the world”, “at the same time [that] the share of green talent in the global workforce increased from 9.6% in 2015 to 13.3% [at the time of data collection] in 2021”, [for] “an annual growth rate of 6% and a cumulative growth rate of 38%.” Accompanying this quick and relatively high growth rate is also the insight that “growth in the demand for workers with green skills has outpaced the growth in the supply of green talent,” meaning that, soon enough, there won’t be enough green talent to fuel net-zero and decarbonization goals. Spoiler alert: if climate pledges and saving the planet have to fail mid-effort, I’d prefer is not be as a result of educational inaction or failure of companies to invest time in upskilling their workforce.
With that being said, let’s assess the green jobs and skills that are seeing recent growth, according to LinkedIn’s findings:
The top 5 fastest-growing green jobs between 2016 and 2021, in terms of annual growth:
1. Sustainability Manager (30%)
2. Wind Turbine Technician (24%)
3. Solar Consultant (23%)
4. Ecologist (22%)
5. Environmental Health and Safety Specialist (20%)
Going back to those earlier definitions, these are merely the fastest growing green jobs, and therefore not inclusive of all jobs requiring green skills. When we look at that data, there’s a marked difference in the types of greening jobs that are growing at the highest rates:
The top 5 fastest-growing greening jobs:
1. Compliance Manager (19%)
2. Facilities Manager (11%)
3. Technical Sales Representative (8%)
These jobs don’t sound like titles traditionally associated with net-zero and sustainability-oriented careers― in fact, they’re so run-of-the-mill as to inspire doubt that one could seriously call themselves a part of the climate solution while holding one of those titles. However, it’s exactly jobs like these, which traditionally include little education in the way of “green skills,” that will aid net-zero and decarbonization goals the most.
When LinkedIn analyzed green skills specifically, they found an interesting trend: “half of the top 10 in-demand green skills match the most popular skills among the green workforce,” meaning that those seeking ‘green education’ or upskilling are doing a pretty good job at choosing and learning those skills that are most needed. So, let’s compare the lists, with those skills marked with * belonging to both the “top ten in-demand green skills required by employers” and “the top ten most popular skills among the green workforce” lists:
The top ten in-demand green skills required by employers (2021):
1. Skill Name: Sustainability
a. Green Skill Category: Sustainable Development
b. Share of Job Postings Requiring the Skill (out of job posting requiring any green skill): 27.6%
2. Skill Name: Remediation
a. Green Skill Category; Environmental Remediation
b. Share of Job Postings Requiring the Skill (out of job posting requiring any green skill): 8.8%
3. Skill Name: Occupational Safety and Health Advisor (OSHA)
a. Green Skill Category: Environmental Policy
b. Share of Job Postings Requiring the Skill (out of job postings requiring any green skill): 8.6%
4. Skill Name: Climate
a. Green Skill Category: Ecosystem Management
b. Share of Job Postings Requiring the Skill (out of job postings requiring any green skill): 5.6%
5. Skill Name: Renewable Energy*
a. Green Skill Category: Renewable Energy Generation
b. Share of Job Postings Requiring Skill (out of job postings requiring any green skill): 5.4%
6. Skill Name: Environmental Awareness*
a. Green Skill Category: Ecosystem Management
b. Share of Job Posting Requiring Skill (out of job postings requiring any green skill): 4.9%
7. Skill Name: Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS)*
a. Green Skill Category: Environmental Auditing
b. Share of Job Postings Requiring Skill (out of job postings requiring any green skill): 3.7%
8. Skill Name: Solar Energy
a. Green Skill Category: Renewable Energy Generation
b. Share of Job Postings Requiring Skill (out of job postings requiring any green skill): 2.6%
9. Skill Name: Corporate Social Responsibility*
a. Green Skill Category: Environmental Policy
b. Share of Job Postings Requiring Skill (out of job postings requiring any green skill): 2.5%
10. Skill Name: Recycling
a. Green Skill Category: Environmental Remediation
b. Share of Job Postings Requiring Skill (out of job postings requiring any green skill): 4.1%
While the previously listed green skills are obvious needs for green and greening industries, there are a shortage of workers with those needed skills, especially as green industries― and even non-green industries― show no signs of slowing green hiring. Despite green talent on LinkedIn listing skills compatible with green hiring pushes, there is still massive want for those skills across industries.
A recent report by Microsoft and Boston Consulting Group found a “sustainability skills gap” on par with LinkedIn’s finding, and conducted analysis regarding how companies are choosing to go about the greening jobs process when there is such a shortage of skilled green workers. By conducting large-scale surveys, interviews, etc., Microsoft found that companies are choosing to close the green skills hap by hiring “68 percent of their sustainability leaders… from within their own company,” which includes “Sixty percent of sustainability team members join[ing] without expertise in the field.” There’s an argument to be made that upskilling existing workers may be easier than hiring externally and having to train on industry-specifics, but Microsoft and Boston Consulting also concluded that the internal upskilling approach “…will not scale to meet either the business community’s or the planet’s needs” and that “far more talent with sustainability skills and fluency than is currently being trained within these companies’ businesses” will be needed in order to see corporate climate pledged through.