Datasets used
Job adverts
The Green Jobs Explorer is powered by just under four million UK job adverts from Nesta’s Open Jobs Observatory. These job adverts are grouped by occupation using the 2020 Extended Standard Occupational Classifications (see below). We remove any occupations with under 50 job adverts, leaving us with a total of 1059 occupations. The number of job adverts per occupation had a median value of 772 (with an interquartile range of 215-2,987).
We assign regions to each job advert using the International Territorial Levels (ITL) standard classifications. Job adverts are assigned to one of 12 ITL 1 regions (the least granular), one of 37 ITL 2 regions and one of 159 ITL 3 regions (the most granular). When grouped by region, 100% of ITL 1 and 2 regions have over 1,000 job adverts, and 100% of ITL 3 regions have over 100 job adverts (92% have over 1,000 job adverts). All London ITL 2 and 3 regions are grouped together and hence we don't show data from the individual London boroughs. We did this because lots of job adverts can't be accurately mapped to an ITL 2 or 3 region since they give a generic location of "London". This meant we had an inflated number of job adverts grouped into the ITL 2 and 3 codes that sit in the geographical centre of London.
A note on using online job adverts
We are aware online job adverts are biased in certain ways. They don't represent the full breadth of the labour market, and likely underestimate skills from primary industries such as agriculture, as well as the performing arts, where job adverts are not the main source of recruitment. In addition, they are used as tools for attracting candidates - so therefore might not reflect the nature of the occupations. For example, they might overly emphasise green aspects of the job or the greenness of the company hiring. We hope by aggregating our millions of job adverts by occupation we can minimise these effects.
Green skills
Two sources helped us find green skills in job adverts. First, the European Commission’s European Classification of Occupations, Skills and Competences (ESCO) developed a skills taxonomy for the green transition, adding ‘green’ labels to their full taxonomy of skills and knowledge concepts. Their green skills list can be found on their website here. Second, we also use the US’s Occupational Information Network’s (O*NET) expertly curated list of 72 green topics.
To calculate the percentage of skills that are green for each of our job adverts we identified what proportion of the skills were green based on the green ESCO taxonomy and the O*NET green topics. When reporting on the most common green and non-green skills we use ESCO taxonomy preferred skill names. You can find out more about this process by reading our methodological blog.
A note on health and safety skills
“Health and safety regulations” is an ESCO green skill defined as “Necessary health, safety, hygiene and environmental standards and legislation rules in the sector of particular activity”. However, we feel that not all aspects of this skill are green (e.g., making sure fire exits are clear).
This skill appears in 3.5% of job adverts, whereas the second most common green skill occurs in 0.4% of job adverts. Therefore, since this skill is by far the most common green skill and appears very prominently across this tool, we decided to remove it from our most common green skills lists within the Green Jobs Explorer tool. However, since it is a green skill by ESCO’s definition, we still include it when calculating the percentage of green skills. Since our results are averaged over many job adverts and include many skills, including this skill vs not makes a difference of 0.4% on average to the percentage of green skills. The occupation affected the most by this skill are Lifeguards which have a high percentage of green skills due to many of these job adverts asking for health and safety skills.
Industries
To understand the green labour market from an industry perspective, we needed to first assign Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes to job adverts. SIC codes are the Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) classification framework for economic activities. They’re hierarchical and range from manufacturing and sustainability consulting to recruitment. The latest version – UK SIC 2007 – can be accessed via the ONS website here.
In addition to defining SIC codes, the ONS also regularly reports on SIC level statistics, from earnings and hours worked by industry, to industry turnover and employment size. Most relevantly, the ONS recently released experimental estimates of the green labour market, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emission intensity by SIC code per year. The emission intensity (which is the level of emissions per unit of economic output) value for 2021 is behind our industry greenness measure.
You can find out more about how we extracted SIC codes from job adverts in our methodological blog.
Occupations
We assign each of our job adverts to a Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) code. SOC codes were designed by the ONS, with the most recent version updated in 2020. Each occupation has a 4-digit SOC or a more granular 6-digit extended SOC. In the Green Jobs Explorer, the data behind each occupation is the aggregation of all our job adverts for a particular 2020 Extended SOC.
The ONS also created a dataset of time spent on green tasks per SOC. This data is based on research done by the US’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) and gives estimates of the fraction of time spent doing green tasks per SOC 2010. More about their methodology can be found on the ONS website here. Thus by linking job adverts to SOC codes, we can find the fraction of time spent on green tasks per occupation.
You can find out more about how we extracted SOC codes from job adverts in our methodological blog.