Edition: October 10th, 2021
Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS
- Excerpts from article by Karin Kimbrough, published on weforum.org (World Economic Forum)
The last few months of extreme weather incidents have been a devastating reminder of the damage the climate change crisis is inflicting on communities around the world. The world leaders are discussing options focusing on accelerating the shift to a green economy.
Green jobs are jobs that focus on reducing carbon emissions or restoring nature or making other environmental improvements.
It’s important to note that green jobs and skills are essential to transition to a green economy. This, of course, poses questions, challenges and opportunities for labour force planning, globally.
Green jobs hiring is underway
- Over the next decade, we expect to see millions of new jobs created globally due to new climate policies and commitments.
- The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 24 million jobs worldwide could be created by the green economy alone, by 2030.
- On LinkedIn, we can see that the shift to hiring for the green economy is already underway worldwide.
- Since 2017, we’ve seen the demand for talent with green skills steadily increase as governments and companies step up their commitments and actions to achieve their climate and sustainability goals.
- As the need for these greener roles grows, employers are increasingly focused on green skills, rather than university degrees.
- This is partly due to the high demand and the relatively low supply of talent.
- We’re seeing scenarios play out where financial investors are recruiting climate scientists without formal training in finance, but who know a lot about how to assess the climate benefits of an investment project.
- Candidates with green skills are being evaluated differently and setting themselves apart.
What is ‘green talent’?
We define green talent as someone who either has at least one skill explicitly listed on their profile that our expert taxonomists classified as a “green” skill, and/or works in a job that we consider a “green” job.
Green skills are abilities or knowledge a worker can use to prevent, monitor, or clean up pollution, and optimise stewardship and conservation of the natural resources that companies use to produce goods and services.
Some of the fastest-growing green jobs are in fields like:
- Ecosystem management
- Environmental policy
- Sustainable procurement
Which industries are witnessing demand for green jobs?
There’s no such thing as a single “green industry” anymore. We are seeing green jobs span across a wide range of industries, from the obvious ones like renewable energy, to more unexpected ones like finance, fashion technologies and transportation.
Employers increasingly expect all members of their workforce to be actively thinking about how to do their jobs more sustainably. Also, business leaders across industries are setting ambitious goals to be carbon negative in the near future.
While green talent development is growing faster in sectors like energy and mining, green jobs and talent actually have a higher overall presence in healthcare, agriculture, transportation, construction and manufacturing.
How can we achieve a green economy?
- It is critical to broaden the aperture through which we think about the skills and jobs that contribute to a zero-carbon, clean economy.
- We need to include a range of jobs that aren’t traditionally thought of as green. Because how people perform these jobs will have a major impact on whether economies meet their climate goals.
- All industries need to be moving in this direction together for us to achieve a green economy.
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(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)
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