With climate goals accelerating and younger people increasingly interested in pursuing sustainability missions, many employers risk missing the mark on these goals due to outdated or closed-minded hiring practices and claims of talent shortages in their field.
“The demand for business people who understand sustainability is going to skyrocket,” Megan Way, associate professor of economics at Babson College and a labor market researcher, told Newsweek in a conversation on Tuesday. “As [the general public] is more cognizant of the fact that climate change is imminent, firms are really going to be looking to show their clients and their customers that they’re paying attention.”
With the growth in demand for green talent outpacing the growth of supply and ambitious climate goals in place for countries and businesses, the institutions of academia, policy and business must adjust their hiring practices in order to save the environment.
Green business leaders often say the job market presents a skills gap while recent research from LinkedIn suggests that gap is growing. This could compromise the mission of these companies as seats go unfilled.
They often find themselves “fishing from the same ponds” as their competition, or poaching from their competition, said Neil Yeoh, founder and CEO of OnePointFive, a climate consulting firm, who urged business leaders to stop looking for the “sustainability unicorn” for every job opening during a recent Climate Week NYC panel.
Under the desert’s heat, Cullen Curarelli, a recently laid-off Ohio plumber enrolled in the Cerro Coso Community College Wind Turbine Technician Class, performs his maiden climb on a wind turbine, on September 11, 2009, in Tehapachi, California. Green business leaders often say the job market presents a skills gap.
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Way added that poaching likely drives wages up for a small group of specialized employees, and does nothing to grow the pot. For playing a role in growing the market, she suggested in-house training to fill knowledge gaps on green skills or sustainability principles.
“Getting those enthusiastic, newer people to the industry and putting them through training and letting them look around and see what can they bring to this job description, is the way, from a labor economics perspective, to really add to the sustainability talent base in the U.S.,” she explained.
If the only people hired are the ones with highly specialized education and experience, it will significantly limit a company’s applicant pool and the quality of its workforce. Multiple research groups have found that job seekers in the general population are attracted to strong ESG and climate missions, especially the younger generations.
“There are many people who have a lot of the skills you need. You have to look outside of traditional talent pools,” said Efrem Bycer, who leads global sustainability partnerships and North America workforce policy partnerships at LinkedIn, on the Wednesday afternoon panel with Yeoh and two industry professionals. “[Poaching] is not the way you build a climate workforce at scale…so we need to find new ways to bring in talent.”
Yeoh completed a masters in environmental management in 2020 but said he “learned less than 10 percent of the skills I need today,” in that program. Advanced degrees are one of the indicators employers focus on, but practically speaking, it’s no guarantee.
“They did not have a greenhouse gas accounting course, crazy,” Yeoh continued, pointing out that while he appreciated his learning experience, it was costly, time-consuming and outdated.
Before meeting Yeoh in graduate school, OnePointFive co-founder Matthias Muehlbauer had an audit background but no sustainability experience. His career arc offers an illustrative example of the approach needed to address green talent gaps.
“We brought him in because we saw the overlaps…[and] because audit skills are much more important and harder to gain than, say, teaching someone about greenhouse gas accounting,” Yeoh explained. “Now he’s one of the experts.”
Yeoh shared a few case studies and anecdotal examples of how to find or develop “embedded” or hidden green talent within a company: A former flight attendant moved to their airline’s corporate sustainability team after taking a bootcamp-style course, and a number of tech sales people who were laid off over the last two years have pivoted into sales roles for green or climate technology companies.
For many in the job market, moving to something that serves the environment not only aligns with their values, it aligns with the direction that most industries are heading.
“For a lot of people, this is just where their job is going,” Bycer said, citing data from his recent report saying that job seekers with green skills or job titles have a 55 percent higher chance of being hired than the general workforce. He and other panelists advocated for embedding green skill sets into all teams, like finance, tech and supply chain, for example.
“[If you are] managing investments all over the world, and you’re not thinking about how climate change presents a risk in that investment…that’s just what the world is today,” he added.
“The world needs it. Our customers are demanding it. It’s good for business and society….It hasn’t slowed things down,” Cassandra Garber, chief sustainability officer at Dell, previously told Newsweek in a December 2023 interview.
Juniper Networks’ SVP and General Counsel Rob Mobassaly added in December that even though the issue of environmental preservation has become politicized, those objecting fail to realize that businesses are pursuing environmental goals for business reasons.
“The reason we do this isn’t because we’re trying to make a political statement or a social statement,” he said. “We do it because there is a true business imperative for what we do.”
To meet this business imperative, recruiting needs to be more open-minded and employers need to be ready to train people who have some of the key skills that they’re looking for. Business leaders could offer a sustainability-themed “lunch and learn” simply to begin a discussion and help identify interest among current employees, the Climate Week panelists suggested.
In a study of an industry attempting to evolve, Josh Bersin, CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, a research and consulting firm, said “the auto industry’s HR practices are well behind other fast-changing industries,” in a statement sent to Newsweek.
“New disciplines like skills-based hiring, internal academies, flexible work and retention programs are needed. Many of these companies are trying to hire their way into the future, but they’re relying on outdated recruitment tactics,” he said, echoing the Climate Week panel. This advice applies to other industries as well, Bersin added.
“As we’ve learned in other industries, EV transition is not just a problem of acquiring the specific skills needed,” he said. “These companies need to transform their people practices to improve internal development, agile work models, skills-based talent mobility and cross-industry sharing.”
