Earth Day - Towards a Green Future

With new ambitious climate goals to address global warming, we will need millions of workers transitioning into and joining the green economy.?In celebration of Earth Day we decided to take a deep dive into the current and future state of jobs and the green economy, and the opportunities they present for professionals.?

What is a “green job” anyway??It’s a complex question. Many jobs are important to the greening of the economy - such as logistics managers - yet these are not traditionally “green” in the sense that their function is to move toward a low-carbon economy. Our research has shown us that jobs aren’t really “green” or “not green”, but rather fall on a spectrum of greenness. We measure the “greenness” of the skills in different jobs as a way of approximating the “greenness” of those jobs.??

Since we have a list of the most representative skills for each occupation on LinkedIn, we can calculate the intensity of green skills in the occupation by dividing the number of green skills in the list by the total number of skills in the list. Using this method, we let the skill content of jobs tell us which jobs are more and less intensive in green skills. We also calculate how many times an occupation uses green skills across industries to calculate the prevalence of green skills within an occupation across the economy.??

The chart below illustrates our approach: it plots the green skill intensity of a variety of jobs against the prevalence of green skills in those jobs across industries. Jobs in the upper-right corner strongly use green skills, and people in those jobs use those green skills in every industry where we find that job. (It’s no surprise to see “Ecologist” and “Environmental Scientist” in the upper-right since they are recognizable as “green.)” By contrast jobs in the lower-left corner don’t use many green skills, and people who use green skills aren’t very widely spread among industries with that job.?

To achieve a green economy, jobs need to shift “up” and “right”

Certain jobs in the lower left are high-value targets for greater green skilling. Charting out where a job is today helps identify occupations that can gain the most from green-skilling investments by governments, employers, and workers.?

Take Risk Management Officers. Currently, the intensity of green skills is relatively low across the many industries that employ Risk Management Officers. Yet, assessing and measuring risks associated with climate change are increasingly part of the risk management landscape. This suggests a large opportunity for upskilling Risk Management Officers - effectively pushing them up and to the right on the graph over time.?

Facilities Managers have a lower skills intensity than Risk Management Officers, even though the use of green skills among Facilities Managers is more prevalent across industries. Increasing the intensity of green skills among professionals and boosting their understanding of the environmental impacts of their facilities, would help them find ways to mitigate those impacts, and the impact of extreme weather events, on facility operations.??

Public Health Officers could also benefit from additional green skilling. Though Public Health Officers have a relatively wide prevalence of green skills across industries, likely due to the need to understand the impacts of pollution on public health, there is an opportunity to expand and deepen the use of green skills among public health officers. This is all the more relevant in the wake of COVID-19 and the increasing evidence of the linkages between climate change and pandemic prevalence.?

Why measure jobs this way??

We want to broaden the aperture through which we think about the skills and jobs that contribute to a zero-carbon, clean economy. With this definition, we include scores of jobs that aren’t traditionally thought of as “green” - such as fashion designers or vehicle maintenance technicians because --how people perform these jobs has a major impact on whether economies meet their climate goals. The responsibility for greening the economy applies to a lot more people than solar panel installers and sustainability consultants.?

Free learning courses to help you go green

If you’re looking to explore opportunities in green jobs we’re unlocking three LinkedIn Learning courses related to sustainability from April 19th to April 26th for you to check out.

• Sustainability Strategies – Get an overview of how to incorporate sustainability into business operations, responsible supply chain management, creation of sustainable products and services, and management and measurement of environmental impacts.
• Learning Design for Sustainability – Explore the tools, resources and best practices of sustainable design for products, the built environment, and services.
• Employees’ Guide to Sustainability – Learn how individual and collective action can help address climate change, land and ocean degradation, and overconsumption.

There are exciting opportunities to uncover and, in the weeks ahead, we will continue to explore them. In future posts, we will look at other aspects of the greening of jobs, including where geographically they are concentrated, which companies are hiring the most green talent, and how professionals are transitioning into green jobs.