Our aim was to support the green job sector by helping people to identify how green jobs really are. If we could create a measure or tool for this purpose, we would enable a number of different actors to make better decisions about green jobs. This might be providing local government with better information on how to support skills transitions or providing policy teams with new insights on emerging green sectors or jobs.

This work forms part of Nesta’s sustainable future mission, which focuses on how the switch to a greener, lower-carbon economy can also increase the UK’s productivity. One of the main ways to achieve this is by creating more highly skilled jobs in green industries and seeking innovative ways to get more people training for and working in highly paid, highly productive green jobs. 

Our project is part of the ESRC-funded Productive and Inclusive Net Zero (PRINZ) project group, which includes researchers from Imperial College London, University of Leeds, the London School of Economics, University of Oxford and the University of Surrey. This project aims to explore the link between productivity, the transition to net zero and levelling up to create more jobs. 

Our approach built on previous work on extracting skills from job adverts which was created by Nesta in partnership with the Department for Education and the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE). The aim of the Observatory is to provide insights from online job adverts into the demand for occupations and skills in the UK. We are collecting the adverts with the permission of job sites and to date we have collected several million job postings.

There is a broad push at the moment to build better definitions of green jobs in order to support the UK’s move to net zero. We thought we could make a unique contribution to this effort by focusing on micro-level, multi-dimensional and continuous measures that are widely usable and by making our work open and accessible to other stakeholders.

We used artificial intelligence to look at 4 million job adverts, extracting the green skills mentioned within them, and combined this with the time spent on green tasks and industry emissions data. With this, we estimated the greenness of different occupations in the UK. To make this data available, we developed the Green Jobs Explorer, which provides information on the greenness of over 1000 occupations.

You can find out more about our methodology, which uses data science methods like natural language processing, in the following blogs:

• How we assigned job adverts to different industries
• How we assigned job adverts to different occupations
• How we extracted green skills from job adverts

We produced a complementary piece, How green is your job, really?, which outlines the major findings from this work and provides some ideas for using the Green Jobs Explorer. Some of our key takeaways were:

• Our proxy measures demonstrate that there are important factors to consider regarding a job's greenness. They indicate that there is no such thing as a job that is 'green' or 'not green'. The Green Jobs Explorer reveals aspects of greenness in various jobs beyond the traditional image of engineers in hard hats and high-vis clothing by wind turbines.
• We found that green skills still make up a small portion of most jobs. Monitoring green skills on an ongoing basis could support the transition to net zero by influencing sectors outside the ‘green’ economy; it would encourage them to share responsibility for reducing emissions by transitioning their workforces and industries.
• Higher levels of green skills in emissions-intensive industries, such as manufacturing and construction, will be particularly crucial in the immediate phase of the green transition. The Green Jobs Explorer might facilitate a benchmarking of industries to assess progress towards the green transition – with a focus on the development and demand for green skills.
• Measuring and mapping 'greenness' reveals a regional green jobs story, driven more by large manufacturing and industrial towns than by major cities. 
• Cross-functional skills play a crucial role in greener jobs, just as they do in other sectors. Findings from the Green Jobs Explorer highlight just how important they are because of how often they co-occur with green skills. 

We are now focussing our efforts on how we make our green measures useful to stakeholders interested in measuring green jobs, using our data to support their research and analysis. We have published the tool at greenjobexplorer.org/ and are sharing this with key stakeholders to get feedback on how they could use this tool and what improvements we could make in the future. The tool will be kept up to date up until June 2025.