Green skills for the labour market

Green skills for the labour market: defining skills for the green transition

The transition to a greener economy will alter most existing occupations, change their task compositions and skills requirements. An understanding of what skills are associated with a green transition is critical for the labour market to identify skill gaps and skills that can be re-used in green jobs and occupations. It is critical as well for the education and training systems in order to address the emerging demand. So, what skills and competences are required in a green sustainable economy? How do we define them?

In relation to work, skills are generally identified through their relationship with jobs and occupations. The identification of green skills starts with an identification of green jobs and occupations. However, one should not see occupations as being either green or brown, but rather as a continuum. Instead of a binary classification of occupations, labelling them as green or non-green, the focus is on “greening of occupations”.

Thus, O’NET, a US database containing occupation-specific information on skills and tasks, defines green occupations as any occupation affected by greening, whether via increased demand, changes in tasks, or the creation of unique worker requirements. It further identifies green tasks based on the research and analysis of green occupations.

This distinction between green and non-green specific tasks in the O*NET database allowed the researchers to estimate “greenness” of occupations and identify four macro-groups of work tasks that are especially important for green occupations: engineering and technical skills, science skills, operation management skills and monitoring skills. This illustrates that green occupations are relatively more complex and require substantial training and higher levels of education (Green Skills | Giovanni Marin, Davide Consoli, and Francesco Vona).

The other approach to identify green skills is by using a dictionary of keywords that classifies skills and jobs as green. Thus, the European classification of skills, competences and occupations (ESCO) is used as a dictionary, describing, identifying and classifying occupations and skills relevant for the EU labour market and education and training. It’s new pre-release version introduces 132 new statements tagged as green skills and knowledge.

ESCO intends to define not only occupation-specific green skills and knowledge that professionals need to possess to move forward the green economy, but also transversal skills and competences that every individual should be equipped with to live in the green economy. The ongoing revision of ESCO introduces the new transversal skills hierarchy that allocates green skills under the life skills and competences cluster.

Related practices applying these two approaches, a task-based (O*NET) or a skill-based (ESCO), include, for example, the Excelsior Information System in Italy that uses the O*NET classification to analyse the demand for green skills in the Italian labour market; or the use of ESCO as the reference skills taxonomy for labour market intelligence, including to identify emerging trends in green skills and occupations (ETF project on big data analysis of online job vacancies in Georgia, Tunisia and Ukraine).

We are looking for examples of practices on how green skills and jobs are identified in the countries. Do you have any examples of how green skills and occupations are defined or understood in your country?