Learn about green jobs and skills
This tool harnesses job advert data from January 2021 to November 2024 to offer new insights into the green labour market. You can explore and compare the environmental aspects of different occupations to build a more nuanced picture of green jobs in the UK.
Explore green jobs Compare green jobsThree shades of green
Is a sustainability advisor in the petrochemical industry a 'green job'?
Jobs can be green in some respects and not green in others.
We want to provide more information on the shades of green in all jobs. To start, we are providing information on three metrics:
Recruiting: Sustainability consultant
This role requires strong skills in sustainability reporting and knowledge of renewable technologies. It also requires a sound understanding of data analysis and communication skills.
Green skills
We extracted the skills mentioned in millions of job adverts and identified which were green.
To standardise the skills, we used machine learning to find skills that had similar meanings to the green skills and topics contained in European and US taxonomies.
Industry greenness
The description of the firm in each advert was used to infer the broader industry. That allowed us to determine the mix of industries that each occupation was spread across. We then used a dataset available from the ONS to provide the weighted average of CO2 emissions (per unit of economic output) for those industries.
Recruiting: Sustainability consultant
We are an organisation that is part of the architectural sector and our focus is on the built environment.
Biological scientists and biochemists are estimated to have spent 15.6% of their time on green tasks in 2019
The time estimates are based on:
- How relevant are green tasks to your job?
- How frequently do you perform these tasks?
Time on green tasks
An ONS study estimated the time that workers spent on green tasks using information gathered on jobs from the US.
The estimates are for 2019. These are only available for broad occupation groups.
The occupational picture
Insurance administrators
Based on 5,976 job adverts for this occupation since 2021:
- Green skills made up 0.3% of all skills mentioned, which is in the lowest band across occupations.
- The industries posting these ads were in the highest band of industry greenness (based on CO2 emissions).
The median annual salary was £23,000 - £27,000 from the ads that mentioned salary.
The ONS estimated that 0.0% of hours were spent on green tasks in 2019 for workers in the broader parent group for this occupation, which is in the band.
The three metrics are provided for over 1,000 occupations, along with information on the most commonly requested green skills and advertised salaries.
The bigger picture
The locations of job adverts allow us to explore the green shades across regions.
Which region has the highest proportion of green skills in their job adverts?
Assigning job adverts to occupations
Extracting green skills from job adverts
Assigning job adverts to industries