According to a recent report, the concentration of green skills is expanding in all 48 of the countries studied, but demand for a sustainable talent pool is outstripping the skills available.
Globally, despite growing demand for green skills, just one in eight workers have at least one green skill necessary to deliver sustainability ambitions.
The data from LinkedIn analyses their membership base of 930 million users across 48 countries to uncover gaps in the market for green skills. Between 2022 and 2023, green talent accounted for 12.3 per cent of the workforce, while the share of job posting requiring at least one green skill over the same period sat higher at 22.4 per cent. Extending this over a five year period, between 2018 and 2023, the share of green talent grew 5.4 per cent while the share of jobs requiring at least one green skill grew by 9.4 per cent.
The report highlights three key sectors which will be pivotal to carbon reduction and net zero delivery: energy, transportation, and finance. Renewable energy is a key growth sector. Between 2015 and 2023, employment in the renewable energy sector grew in all 48 countries the report studied, and for every 100 workers who left the renewable energy industry, 120 entered.
Looking at transportation, the EV boom is propping up employment here. The share of auto workers with specific EV skills rose by a median of 61 per cent over the fiver year period. As of March 2023, Sweden has the highest number of workers with EV skills, 8.1 per cent, followed by the UK with 7.3 per cent, and Germany with 6.1 per cent.
The finance industry harbours a lower number of green skills than average. While the median green talent concentration sits at 12.3 per cent across all industries, the finance sector only has a concentration of 6.8 per cent, equating to just one in every 15 workers having a green skill. This sets finance behind energy, mining, agriculture, healthcare, and manufacturing in terms of availability of green talent.
The median LinkedIn hiring rate for workers with at least one green skill is 29 per cent higher than the workforce average, highlighting the benefit of acquiring green skills, such as increased attractiveness to employers.
What’s more, getting ahead of the trend by acquiring green skills earlier on in one’s career has its perks. In 81 per cent of transitions into green roles, workers already had green skills or job experience behind them. However, the newer green professions, including sustainability managers and energy auditors, are more readily available to those yet to acquire green skills or work experience.
The solution to ramping up green skills and closing the gap to ensure net zero delivery could lie in closing the prominent gender gap.
Delving further into the analysis, there is a distinct gender gap in the market for green skills. According to further analysis on gender in the green skills market, one in six men qualify as green talent, while only one in ten women do. This stacks up as nine in ten women lacking a single green skill.
The gender skills gap varies across industries. The renewable energy sector is specifically lacking in female green talent, with just 34 per cent of the renewable energy workforce being female, compared to an industry average of 44 per cent. Breaking this down into leadership roles, just 21.8 per cent of renewable energy company founders are women.
What’s more the gap is widening. Over the past seven years, the green skills gender gap has broadened by 25 per cent. However, the gap could be addressed by increasing appetite among female workers to acquire green skills. Since 2021, women have joined the green talent pool at a rate of 12.3 per cent, compared to 9.1 per cent for men. In spite of this, analysis has shown that women will need to join the green talent pool at 2.5 times the rate they are today in order to close the gender skills gap.
Finally, an analysis of the types of skills where these gaps are most prominent highlight the industries and roles with the most severe gender imbalance issues. Focussing on the most sought after green skills, women are ahead of men in just a handful categories, sustainability education, renewable energy law and policy, and sustainable development (including fields related to the circular economy), and are tied with men in the field of sustainable procurement.
The greatest gap exists in the field of “cross functional green skills,” where men are almost 3 times more likely than women to have this particular skill. In particular, “cross functional green skills” refer to maintenance and repair projects, such as for electrical systems, buildings and computers.
