What is a Green Skill?

What is a green skill?

Terence Hogarth

June 2023

Why do we need to know about green skills?

A simple question, but one which eludes a simple answer. It is also an important one. Climate change and the need to reduce carbon emissions are placing substantial pressures on countries to adapt their economies in a wide variety of ways. Adaptation requires know-how and skills. This is why detailed information on green skills is needed. Defining that know-how and skills has proved to be far from straightforward. But methods, methodologies and tools are increasingly available to identify green skills and green jobs. These are summarised below.

Sectoral based approaches

One approach to identifying green skills is to define green sectors in the first instance. The core green sectors are typically those providing a range of environmental products and services. In Europe, these are defined as sectors where the principal economic activity is the protection and management of the environment. They accounted for around 2.5 per cent of employment in the EU in 2020. Because data by occupation and qualification are readily available and provide, albeit imperfect, measures of skill, these are used as proxy measures of green skills within green sectors.

Green jobs within green sectors

In the USA substantial research has been undertaken to identify green or greenish jobs in green or greenish sectors. The Green Goods and Services Survey, undertaken by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) asked employers in green or greenish sectors to indicate the share of their revenue accounted for by green goods and services. This was used as a proxy to estimate the share of green employment. In 2010, there were an estimated 3.1m green goods and services jobs, equivalent to 2.4 per cent of total employment.

The Green Technologies and Practices (GTP) Survey, also undertaken by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, identified the jobs in which workers’ duties involved making their establishment’s production processes more environmentally friendly or less resource-intensive. In total, 35 000 employers were surveyed to reveal the wide variety of jobs which might be considered green or greenish. Green jobs were varied and included many that were relatively highly skilled.

If attention is shifted to those jobs classified as green in workplaces where all of their revenue was accounted for by green goods and services, bus drivers emerged as the largest occupational group. This further highlights the variety of jobs which might be considered green.

Green jobs wherever they might be

The approaches described above are dependent upon being able to identify, in the first instance, green sectors. There is recognition that green jobs may well exist outside of green sectors. The O*NET classification of green jobs sought to identify green occupations regardless of the sector in which they were located. Three types of green jobs were identified (see box below).

O*NET classification of green jobs

Source: Dierdorff et al. (2009)

An initial attempt to use this classification to estimate green employment in Europe suggested that around 30 per cent of employment might well be in green increased-demand occupations and 20 per cent in green-enhanced ones. This points to the widespread demand for green skills across the economy.

From green jobs to green skills

In all of the studies mentioned above, occupations, and to a lesser extent qualification, have been used as proxy measures of skill. The emphasis has been very much on identifying green jobs as a basis for identifying particular skill needs which can be obtained from occupational databases such as ESCO, or datasets containing data derived from online job advertisements (OJAs). In other words, identify the green job and simply look up the skills associated with it.

Given that the green transition is likely to affect most if not all jobs to some degree, there is an argument that the focus should be more on identifying green skills in general, the demand for which might be economy-wide, rather than limited to a particular occupation or group of occupations. Just possibly, there might be, sometimes, a tendency to overly fixate on identifying, in an almost binary fashion, whether a job is green or not.

GreenComp provides a basis for looking at green skills rather than green jobs. It has four broad areas of competence: (i) embodying sustainability values, (ii) embracing complexity and sustainability, (iii) envisioning sustainable futures, and (iv) acting for sustainability – which provides the basis for identifying more specific skill requirements. It provides an all-important starting point for developing a taxonomy of green skills.

If it is possible to fully develop a taxonomy of green skills, then it should be possible to identify the extent to which green skills in varying combinations and at different levels are more or less important requirements within a job. It will provide the means to determine the green component of any job. It is likely that data science techniques, such as those employed to obtain data from OJAs, will have a role to play here.

Closing remarks

In a relatively short space of time, as the implications of climate change have become all too apparent, knowledge about the skills required to combat, mitigate and potentially reverse its all too abject impacts on economies and societies, has advanced apace. As the foregoing commentary suggests, the progress made with respect to the concepts, methods, methodologies, and tools to identify green skills and the means to effectively communicate that information are increasingly within the skills analyst’s grasp.