How to become more competitive during the global green skills shortage

Whether you’re hiring or searching for a role in climate and sustainability, these resources can help you be more successful in the competition for green jobs and talent.

Note: This article was originally published on Trellis.net – click here to read the article on Trellis.net.

After decades of (rightfully) focusing on creating tools and frameworks for solving the climate crisis and driving sustainable business practices, mainstream attention has finally turned toward the development of a workforce with the skills required to use those tools. 

Whether you call them green skills, climate skills or sustainability skills, there’s a global shortage of workers with them and multiple publications have recently addressed the issue.

The authors of the reports below have collectively produced a body of research that guides the reader toward a comprehensive understanding of the green skills gap. Together, these resources describe the scale and significance of the gap, explain why it exists from both candidate and employer perspectives, identify the most in-demand skills, and offer specific strategies and tools for closing the gap. 

If you’re a hiring manager, this information can help explain the challenges you’ve faced in filling open positions. If you’re a job seeker, these reports can provide valuable insights into the trends impacting your job search. Regardless of your current status in the green workforce, there are plenty of actionable recommendations here for you.    

Each report varies in depth and reflects the publishing organization’s unique perspectives and role within the green jobs ecosystem. While I encourage you to read them all, below is an overview of the key findings from each to help you determine which may be the most beneficial to you. 

Most of the content in these reports is centered on corporate positions; however, it’s important to acknowledge the essential role that the skilled trades play in the world’s transition to a low-carbon economy. The skilled trades are also experiencing a significant worker shortage, and the 2024 U.S. Energy & Employment Report from the Department of Energy is an excellent resource for exploring the shortages in the energy sector.  

What do you think are the most important barriers to closing the green skills gap? What other resources could help us meet the growing demand for green talent? I warmly invite you to join the conversation on LinkedIn and share your thoughts with me and your fellow readers. 

Global Climate Talent Stocktake from LinkedIn

The 2024 Global Climate Talent Stocktake is the perfect place to start as it provides the global and country-specific context required to properly understand the significance of the green skills gap: “By 2050, there will be twice as many jobs requiring green skills as people qualified to fill them if today’s trends continue… Every climate goal around the world, every commitment made, is at risk if we don’t have a workforce that can deliver the change we urgently need.” The report calls for a strong collaboration between enterprises, policymakers, educators and government leaders to upskill the workforce with green skills in order to meet this demand and achieve the pathway to net zero.

The report is full of data-driven insights that should be welcome news to experienced job seekers: 

• While green talent demand worldwide grew 11.6 percent from 2023-2024, supply only increased by 5.6 percent
• Globally, the green hiring rate (the likelihood that a candidate with green skills will be hired) is 54.6 percent greater than the overall hiring rate
• In the U.S., the green hiring rate is a staggering 80.3 percent higher than the overall rate
• Even in the handful of countries where demand for green talent has seen recent declines, green talent hiring rates continue to exceed the average

The report also includes helpful information such as the top 5 most in-demand green jobs in the U.S., Brazil, Australia, U.K., Germany and France, the top 5 fastest-growing green skills in those countries, and an important call to action for the leaders at COP29 to declare workers as enablers of climate ambition during the first COP thematic day dedicated to health and human capital. 

How to Attract People Into Working On Climate from Work On Climate

Although Work On Climate’s “How to Attract People Into Working On Climate” report was published prior to the Global Climate Talent Stocktake, it feels as if it could be a direct response to a question any reasonable recruiter might have after finishing the LinkedIn report: “So how am I going to fill all of these open positions when the competition for green talent is so fierce?” The Work On Climate report offers a deceptively simple-sounding solution: Attract more mainstream talent to climate work. 

The Work On Climate team surveyed over 1,500 climate-concerned Americans not currently working in the space and found that only 12 percent recognize that their job is the most powerful form of climate action available to them — with even more potential for impact than political advocacy or changing their personal behavior. However, after simply learning more about green jobs and what they entail, 55 percent of respondents expressed an intent to pursue a climate job within the next year.

Beyond the lack of awareness of jobs as a powerful tool for action, other key barriers identified include a lack of understanding of how previous experience could be applied to climate work, a lack of knowledge about what specific climate skills are required for success in various roles, and uncertainty around how to acquire those skills.  

Actionable recommendations for hiring managers to attract more diverse, mainstream talent center on how to communicate with potential candidates. According to the report, effective messaging should emphasize how climate work leverages transferrable skills and should focus on the more traditional indicators of job quality including job stability, work/life balance, compensation and career growth potential.

The report also includes additional helpful insights for managers such as the relationship between an employee’s sense of personal influence and their willingness to pursue climate work and the availability of Project Drawdown’s Job Function Action Guides for inspiring current employees to upskill.  

The Climate Workforce Playbook from OnePointFive

OnePointFive’s new playbook, “Forget the Sustainability Unicorn — How To Build a Climate Workforce,” builds on the key learnings from LinkedIn’s Green Skills Data by adding insights from interviews with leading sustainability practitioners and new survey data. In addition to identifying why many job seekers transitioning into climate work tend to struggle with securing roles, the playbook details important barriers to filling climate positions from an employer perspective and provides actionable strategies for overcoming them. 

Many companies still find it difficult to identify and articulate the key skills required for climate roles. This often results in hiring managers competing for a limited supply of “sustainability unicorns” who possess a unique combination of sustainability expertise and industry- and role-specific experience. This frequently leads to employers overvaluing broad climate knowledge during the hiring process when success in many roles is actually reliant upon specific technical skills such as supply chain management, carbon accounting or data modeling. The lack of a nuanced understanding of the skills required for success in individual roles also lends itself to ineffective employee upskilling efforts.  

OnePointFive’s playbook provides guidance for building a climate workforce strategy plan with examples for how to embed sustainability skills within functions such as accounting and finance, IT management, procurement and supply chain, plus examples for upskilling specific roles in the energy, fashion and finance industries. 

The playbook also highlights several important factors that would support progress such as an increase in the number of asynchronous and microcredential training programs related to green skills, and more organizations recognizing the value of those programs.  

The State of the Sustainability Profession from Trellis Group

Unlike the reports above which focus on expanding the green workforce, The State of the Sustainability Profession 2024 looks at how sustainability work is being carried out within large U.S. companies. The findings offer insight into the skills currently in demand for sustainability-related roles at leading corporations, trends in hiring and compensation, and freelance work. 

General hiring trends are encouraging: 74 percent of the 1,185 survey respondents reported increased staffing on their sustainability teams, with at least two-thirds of new team members joining from outside of the company. Progress is also being made in embedding sustainability professionals within other departments. The percentage of finance and legal teams adding dedicated sustainability resources has more than doubled since 2020, and over a third of respondents have recently added sustainability resources to their marketing and communications, procurement or supply chain teams. This is promising news for job seekers with functional skills looking to transition into sustainability roles.  

The report points to the unprecedented rise in ESG disclosure regulations as a major driver of hiring for sustainability roles. Twenty percent of those surveyed reported the creation of an ESG controller position at their company, and 67 percent have added full-time staff to support ESG disclosure. Skills in data systems management, reporting, and assurance — all critical for supporting compliance with ESG disclosure regulations — will clearly remain in high demand for the foreseeable future.

Additionally, the report includes valuable information for both job seekers and hiring managers including compensation, hiring and demographic data and the tasks most frequently outsourced to freelancers.

Climate Career Standards from Voiz Academy

The above reports demonstrate a clear need for both companies and candidates to have access to resources that provide a detailed account of the specific skills required for success in different green jobs, and the Climate Career Standards provide exactly that for two of the most popular roles in the space: “sustainability analyst,” listed in the LinkedIn report as the third-most in-demand green job title in the U.S., and “decarbonization,” listed as one of the fastest-growing green skills globally. 

Voiz Academy’s research team interviewed practitioners in multiple industries around the world to develop the Climate Career Standards for Sustainability Analyst and Decarbonization Analyst job titles. The report offers a detailed analysis of the skills required for success in each role and recommends a standard set of core skills to be used for evaluating potential candidates and identifying an individual’s upskilling needs. Job seekers should be pleasantly surprised to see how many key skills for both roles are transferable from other professions and functions. 

Skills are categorized into “critical day one skills,” “skills to develop on the job” and “nice to have skills.” This delineation enables hiring managers to better understand what specific skills to prioritize when hiring and allows job seekers to quickly and easily identify which skills gaps are most critical so that they can pursue training more strategically. 

In addition, the report describes “unwritten skills” and “emerging skill needs,” skills that most employers are not currently asking for explicitly but support current and future success in these roles. There is also a section on how job seekers can use the report’s findings to more effectively demonstrate their applicable experience in job interviews.

Job Descriptions Library from Weinreb Group

Weinreb Group is a boutique sustainability search firm placing chief sustainability officers and helping build out their teams. The company’s website hosts a Job Descriptions Library with more than 25 sample job descriptions — an incredibly helpful resource for both hiring managers and job seekers alike, especially for more senior roles.

Each sample provides a standard set of responsibilities and requirements for the role based on the Weinreb Group’s extensive experience with recruiting top sustainability talent for the world’s leading organizations. It’s significantly easier to edit a thoughtful, well-written job description than it is to write a new one from scratch, so this library should be any hiring manager’s first stop when opening a new position. It’s also helpful for job seekers when determining which skills to emphasize on their resumes. 

The library includes sample job descriptions for executive leadership roles such as chief sustainability officer, ESG roles including ESG compliance manager and ESG controller, reporting roles, climate and nature roles, and broader sustainability roles.  

Sustainability skills training series from Trellis Group

The resources above can provide job seekers with a more targeted understanding of the climate and sustainability skills that will make them more competitive candidates for the positions that they are pursuing. They can also assist managers in identifying role-specific needs for hiring or upskilling. The final piece of the puzzle is finding the right training opportunities to develop these skills, and this ongoing article series highlights over 400 offerings to help with exactly that.

The collection covers training for dozens of topics including the top professional certifications in sustainability, navigating reporting and disclosure standards, net-zero strategy, procurement and supply chain, ESG and sustainable finance, renewable energy transitions, technology and financing, circular economy principles and even free training. In addition to more advanced courses and certifications, each article includes a section with free or low-cost options that provide an accessible introduction to the topic.  

Join the conversation

We need more people working in climate and sustainability — period. In order to do that, companies, job seekers, educators, lawmakers and other stakeholders must get better at identifying the skills required for these roles, providing and promoting training to help people develop them, and communicating the benefits of green jobs to professionals not yet working in the space.

I hope that this article has helped you to identify some ways to be more competitive as you look for new talent to hire or new roles to apply for. Since we need to double the size of the green workforce by 2050, why not invite others into the conversation on LinkedIn or share this article with a friend and inspire them to join us? Thanks for doing your part to help close the green skills gap.