Green job growth is leaving a worker skills gap, report says

By Emma Cordover | 11/08/2024 06:16 AM EST

At the current rate, there will be twice as many jobs in the green economy by 2050 as people capable of filling them, a LinkedIn report finds.

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“The share of jobs requiring green skills is growing twice as fast as the people who have green skills,” Efrem Bycer, LinkedIn's head of sustainability and workforce policy partnerships, said in an interview. Carl Court/Getty Images

The clean energy transition is projected to create green jobs in the U.S. at a rate far faster than the nation is producing skilled workers to fill them, according to an analysis by LinkedIn.

The online platform’s green skills report, released Thursday, finds that by 2030 1 in 5 jobs will lack talent to fill them and that “roughly half of jobs in the 2050 green economy will lack the green talent to fill them.”

“The share of jobs requiring green skills is growing twice as fast as the people who have green skills,” Efrem Bycer, LinkedIn’s head of sustainability and workforce policy partnerships, said in an interview. “If we don’t double the projected green talent by 2050 we are going to be leaving potentially a lot of necessary climate impact on the table.”

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LinkedIn compared data collected from January 2021 to July 2024 on the “growth trajectories of the share of job postings for green talent and the supply of such members” on the platform. While demand for green talent in the U.S. grew 9.8 percent between 2023 and 2024, supply increased by only 3.1 percent, according to the report.

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