How Gen Z workers who want green jobs can learn the skills they need to get hired

If you’re under 30, there’s a good chance that you want your next job to focus on climate change. But a new analysis from LinkedIn finds that only one in 20 Gen Z workers have the green skills needed for those jobs and that few know where to begin.



“Gen Z are hungry to work on this,” says Efrem Bycer, who works on sustainability and workforce policy partnerships at LinkedIn. “They care a lot. They’re anxious about it, and they want to figure out how to translate that anxiety into action. I think there’s a really big opportunity to make sure that the generation most passionate about addressing climate change has the skills to actually do something about it.”



In a survey by LinkedIn, around three-quarters of Gen Z workers said that they’re now even more concerned about climate change than they were a year ago. Around half are experiencing climate anxiety or chronic distress about climate disasters and the future of the planet; 61% want to get a green job within the next five years, but fewer than 20% say that they see a clear path to getting those jobs.



Green jobs are hiring



The majority of Gen Z workers say that a lack of green jobs is the biggest barrier they face. But that’s a misperception: The number of green jobs is quickly growing, from renewable energy to roles at climate tech startups. In a previous report, LinkedIn found that the number of green jobs was growing almost twice as quickly as the overall number of workers with green skills.



For the world to succeed in decarbonizing the entire economy, arguably every job should be considered a green job. Some roles can have an outsize impact. If you’re working on a brand’s supply chain, for example, where the majority of most corporate emissions happen, every decision you make could change the company’s carbon footprint. Still, that’s not an obvious place to start if you’re trying to find a climate role.



Companies that talk about their overall commitment to climate action could better spell out the climate potential of overlooked jobs, Bycer says. “If you’re hiring for a sustainability manager, obviously it shows up in every line of that job description,” he says. “But if you’re hiring for a software engineer, maybe it should show up there. Maybe it should show up for somebody who works in marketing.” For companies with ambitious climate goals, having workers with green skills throughout the business is critical. Employers want to hire them, but often say they can’t find candidates with the right background.



The green skills gap



To analyze the gap in skills, LinkedIn looked at data from its nearly 1 billion members. If someone had a clearly “green” job in the past, they’re assumed to have green skills. Others have a green skill listed on their profile, ranging widely from technical skills like soil sampling or energy engineering to more broadly applicable roles like sustainability reporting or carbon accounting.



In its earlier report looking at green skills in workers of all ages, the company found that only one in eight have green skills. But the gap is much more pronounced for the youngest workers, despite their clear interest in working on the problem.



Some data might be missing from LinkedIn profiles—recent college graduates who care about climate change are probably fairly climate literate, for example, something that employers value. But in the survey, more than half of Gen Z workers agreed that they were missing the right qualifications.



There are several ways to learn green skills . First, browsing through job listings on sites like Climatebase can give job seekers a sense of which skills they’d want to learn for the jobs that interest them. Then, one option is to take a class online. Terra.Do , one platform, offers both a broad climate bootcamp and classes in specific skills like carbon accounting. LinkedIn itself offers a variety of related classes. Some universities also offer professional education courses in climate (MIT, for example, offers a lifecycle analysis class ).



For job seekers who want to go back to school full time, there are multiple new graduate degree programs. As one example, UC Berkeley is launching a new master’s degree in climate solutions . Online communities, such as the Slack group Work on Climate —launched by a former Google engineer who saw how many people wanted to transition into climate roles —can also help someone quickly begin to understand the space.



And employers are increasingly realizing that it makes sense for them to offer training in green skills themselves. It may be the only way to hit climate goals in time. The LinkedIn data suggests that at the current rate of progress, by 2030—an important milestone on the path to net zero—only one in 10 Gen Z workers will have sufficient green skills.