Compare
See how green jobs compare.
Measures at a glance
Most occupations engage minimally in green tasks, typically between 0%–1% of overall time spent within the role.
Occupations with a higher average proportion of green skills, exceeding the typical range of 0%–3%, are uncommon; for example, even adverts for environmental consultants ask for at most 21% green skills.
The majority of occupations are in industries that generate on average between 0.1–0.3 GHG emissions relative to economic output, but there are some occupations, such as airport managers (2.3) or importers and exporters (2.48), that have very high emission intensities.
As the average GHG emissions increase for an occupation, there's no consistent increase in green skills or time spent on green tasks, indicated by varying colours mostly trending towards red. High green skill occupations (as you move up the vertical axis) are rare and display varied emissions levels, but generally involve more green tasks, highlighted by greener colours. However, these occupations, such as energy managers and ecologists, are exceptions rather than the rule.
The graph suggests that there is not a straightforward relationship between an occupation's green skills and its environmental impact as measured by average GHG emissions per economic output.
The chart illustrates the nuanced link between industries' environmental initiatives and their GHG emissions.
Industries in the bottom left, with lower green skills and time spent on them, typically emit less GHG. Examples of these industries include social workers, barristers and bookkeepers. More time spent on green tasks (moving right) paradoxically correlates with higher emissions, as shown by the colour change from green to red. This area of the chart is where many manufacturing industry occupations can be found.
There's no clear correlation between the level of green skills (vertical axis) and GHG emissions.
The regional picture
Digging deeper into skills
The most requested green and non-green skills across all our job adverts, and across time, are given in the plots below.
We can also compare occupations by how similar the skills they ask for are. In the following plot, you can select an occupation and see which occupations it is most similar to in terms of skills asked for (horizontal axis). The verticle axis shows the average percentage of skills that are green for this occupation.
Not all skills in green occupations are considered green. Some of these skills will be transversal – for example, communication skills are found across the majority of job adverts regardless of how green the job is. However, some of these skills may be new green skills which weren’t given in the green skill list we searched through. To investigate these complementary skills, we looked at the skills that commonly co-occurred with green skills in the job adverts for green occupations. The plot below shows these.