Transcript provided by Kensho.

Lindsey Hall: Hi. I'm Lindsey Hall, Head of Thought Leadership at S&P Global.

Esther Whieldon: And I'm Esther Whieldon, a senior leader on the Sustainable1 Thought Leadership team.

Lindsey Hall: Welcome to ESG Insider and S&P Global podcast where Esther and I take you inside the environmental, social and governance issues that are shaping the rapidly evolving sustainability landscape.

Esther Whieldon: On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second time as President of the United States. Trump has said he'll pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change and accelerate permits for natural gas pipelines. He has also indicated support for an increase in U.S. oil production.

Lindsey Hall: And pledges like these could have knock-on effects for the pace of the energy transition and for the people who work in the climate and sustainability space. And that's, of course, many of our listeners. So what should we expect about the future of green and sustainable jobs?

Esther Whieldon: Well, today, we're talking with 2 organizations tracking trends in exactly that topic. We'll talk with Efrem Bycer, Senior Lead Manager of Public Policy and Economic Graph at LinkedIn. This is a professional social networking platform that, among other things, puts out an annual green skills report on global demand for green talent. And we'll also hear from Neil Yeoh, Founder and CEO of OnePointFive, which is a climate advisory and academy training firm. OnePointFive released a Climate Workforce Playbook in September 2024 that leveraged LinkedIn's green skills data set.

Today, we'll hear from Efrem and Neil about what's driving demand for sustainability jobs, about the talent shortage and skills gap for these roles and about how organizations can navigate political uncertainty. And we'll dig into how individuals can position themselves to be more competitive in the job market going forward. First up, let's hear from Efrem.

Efrem Bycer: The main trend we're seeing is that the share of job postings that require green skills is growing twice as fast as the green talent pool. Those are the workers who are already working in green titles or have green skills. So we can think of green skills as any skill that is related to climate action. That could be related to mitigation and disaster response, could be related to land management, could be related to reporting and tracking emissions.

So think about any skill that contributes to doing something in a green way. When we think of what a job is, ultimately, a job is a collection of skills and jobs change over time. So one insight that we see at LinkedIn is that between 2015 and 2030, we estimate that the average job will see 65% skills turnover. So if we think of the job as 30 skills, that means 18 skills are going to be different between 2015 and 2030. And those new skills are going to be overwhelmingly digital, and I think AI is continuing to accelerate that. green and human.

Think about -- so everything from how to measure sustainability and think about sustainability to how to work in teams and deal with conflict. So this is where the future of work is going, and we're seeing that reflected in the data.

Esther Whieldon: For a big picture look here, why does having a workforce with green or climate-related skills matter? Kind of what's at stake here?

Efrem Bycer: First and foremost, we know that we have a window of opportunity to mitigate climate change, and we need to be taking as much action as quickly as possible. And every commitment companies make, governments make requires workers with the skills to get it done. In many ways, I think of this growth in employer demand as a lagging indicator of planetary need. And so we just got to bring more workers into the space to solve this problem.

Another thing that we already see is that climate change is already happening. It is already affecting businesses. So for businesses, while we call these green skills, this is just what doing business today is increasingly going to require. If you manage real estate or do asset management, climate risk is going to be an important part of your job, understanding climate risk and mitigating that risk. If you work in supply chain and you have suppliers who may be from parts of the world that are at greater risk of drought or flood, I'm thinking specifically of companies that might be in the food space.

How do you think about the impact climate may have on that supply chain? We've already been thinking a lot about supply chain resiliency through the pandemic. And then I think there's this other element, which is especially for governments, and there's a lot of economic opportunity for workers to be getting into the green space. Not only is employer demand for these skills going up, but what we actually see is that workers who have green skills, we have this metric called the LinkedIn hiring rate. It's a measure of economic churn, basically viewing how quickly people are able to change jobs.

And globally, workers within that green talent pool, the LinkedIn hiring rate is about 55% higher than the workforce overall. So when it comes to trying to address climate change, dealing with the impacts of climate change that are already here and creating economic opportunity, that really sets a pretty strong imperative for investing in green skills.

Esther Whieldon: Efrem went on to describe some of the factors that are driving the increase in demand for workers with green job skills. You'll hear him mention the IRA. That's the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act. Okay. Here's Efrem again.

Efrem Bycer: One is we know that government policy has an impact here. Policies like the IRA derisk a lot of the investment. They help drive a lot of private capital into the space. It creates that demand and therefore, helps stimulate that market. So that is one factor. And this is happening all around the world, where we can see how policy in Germany, they're really interested and focused on using hydrogen as one of the ways to replace some of the use of fossil fuels, and we see hydrogen skills growing really quickly there.

So it's not always a direct one-to-one correlation, but certainly, the kind of market signaling that government can do really matters. So that's only one factor. Another factor is, at some point, these aren't just climate skills, but they are business skills. These are skills that just anybody who works in certain functions within a business is going to have to know because that's just part of what this job requires. And I think that's a big piece of this as well. We're shifting from climate being this niche topic to something that is much more ubiquitous and much more widespread because that's just something that every business, every company is ultimately going to run up against.

And then I think there's a third factor, which is companies are making sustainability commitments. Governments are making sustainability commitments. In the case of companies, it's because they're employees, prospective employees and customers are demanding them to make those commitments in addition to the planetary requirement or increased government scrutiny and regulation. And so that's also driving -- all of those commitments are driving demand for green skills.

And so the question then becomes how do we accelerate the development of workers with those skills. Right now, we project that without significant intervention on the development of green talent side, we need to double the green talent pool just to keep up with employer demand at the current rate of growth. That puts a lot of those commitments we talk about by 2050, 2030, 2040 puts them at risk if we don't have a workforce that can actually deliver them.

Esther Whieldon: So we heard from Efrem how the workforce is changing. He noted that green skills are becoming a standard part of job descriptions across many different fields today, and he listed some of the factors driving demand for green jobs. Our next guest, Neil Yeol of OnePointFive added one more driver of job demand growth to the list, the rise of disclosure standards and regulations. But first, Neil starts off by describing what OnePointFive does and what led him to start the company.

Neil Yeoh: We're a climate advisory and academy training firm based and headquartered in New York, but globally spread with over 800 experts across 50 countries that we either deploy on project work or on training or a combination of workforce transformation. Bit of background myself. I came from a robotics engineering background in Australia, did consulting for a bunch of years.

My MBA at Oxford, then moved to Kenya and worked in off-grid solar and Agritech and got really inspired by how technology can step change sustainable growth and then ended up managing a fund in New York, funding climate solutions and then realized that it wasn't just the check that was stopping us from commercializing climate solutions.

So without a Visa at that time, I ended up at Yale doing a masters of environmental management, where I learned less than 10% of the skills that I needed for my job, but eventually started OnePointFive during the COVID crisis, realizing that we needed not only fractional capacity but also capabilities to help drive forward change.

Esther Whieldon: It's interesting, you mentioned that I think that happens to a lot of people that exit school. They realize, oh, I do need some extra -- like other practical knowledge as well. So what have you observed? And what has your research shown about the hunt for talent? How is it changing? And what's driving those changes?

Neil Yeoh: Yes. So we recently published a climate workforce playbook. We had a data partnership with LinkedIn. We interviewed over 30 industry experts and more than 200 sustainability job seekers and recent hires within our network and beyond. And we found 3 interesting things about the drivers of talent. Number one, it is rising because of voluntary and mandated net zero commitments. If you look at science-based targets initiative, it's seen 133% compound annual growth from 2015 to 2024, with over 7,600 companies submitting a voluntary net zero commitment aligned with the Paris or the science of 1.5 degree Celsius.

The second point is we've seen rising regulations and policies regardless of who's in power on climate disclosures, including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, or CSRD in the EU to the California state regulations, which are actually driving a must do, not a nice to do on sustainability. And then finally, the one that I'm most passionate about is the embedding of sustainability where green skills are now shifting into traditional jobs, but also new job descriptions across the organization.

So think like 2010s when digital marketing was a stand-alone specialty, but now is actually embedded into most marketing roles. We're seeing the same thing where sustainability currently might feel like a side thing, but is now showing up on many more job descriptions, everything from the nontechnical stakeholder management and change management to the creative problem solving and carbon accounting to reporting.

Esther Whieldon: At the top of this episode, I mentioned OnePointFive published a climate workforce playbook. That report was titled, "Forget the sustainability unicorn, how to upskill a climate workforce." I was curious what OnePointFive was referring to when it said companies are looking for a sustainability unicorn and why that's a problem. So I ask Neil about it. Here's what he said.

Neil Yeoh: How we define the sustainability unicorn is that it is the candidate that has the perfect number years of experience in climate and sustainability and industry-specific experience. But as we've seen with the LinkedIn Green Skills report, there's a severe shortage of these professionals, and we're not really adding to the workforce if we're just hiring the same people over and over again. And in fact, organizations don't need to.

What we found from more than 60 professionals that we surveyed that recently got hired into ESG and sustainability roles, they had overlapping skills that weren't necessarily within the recruitment process. We found that supply chain management, data modeling, carbon accounting and reporting were actually 3x more important than the skills that they were hired for like climate change fundamentals and understanding the science.

So what we see is a huge untapped potential for hiring, but a lagging indicator of what is on the job descriptions organizations are hiring for and even more so, the skills that organizations are training their workforce on are either out of date or inaccurate to what's actually needed.

Esther Whieldon: So what are some of the things these companies and other organizations can do to ensure the workforce is equipped with those necessary skills to meet future demand.

Neil Yeoh: Yes. I think that there are 3 things, and we outlined this also in the ability for an organization to audit where its workforce is now all the way to integrating and embedding sustainability within our playbook. But 3 line items that organizations can start with today are: one, make a strategic hire or find an internal sustainability lead or experts externally to set up and lead the organization's sustainability efforts. These are out there, and there are solution providers out there.

The second thing is to cultivate broad climate fluency. It's been shown by studies, including our playbook and LinkedIn's research that without broad fluency, not everyone needs to be a greenhouse gas accounting technical expert. But by understanding the elements of what goes into measuring and reducing impact, even at a general business level, key departments can be part of the change. And in fact, we even had the CSO of Starbucks in our academy that we brought in as an industry expert.

And the Starbucks sustainability team is less than a dozen people. And where they really implement change is through having skills embedded through their procurement team, their sales team, their product team such that they can leverage existing workforce with upskilling to make sure that initiatives continue to move forward even if there's a change in the C-suite level.

And then finally, the third part is to really identify and address these gaps by pinpointing the areas that are critical for a particular organization within its industry and the strategy that it has to make sure that it's adopting that. So a solution for a technology firm with AI versus a consumer company with products will have a very different decarbonization pathway and therefore, different skills that are required across the organization.

Esther Whieldon: At the start of today's episode, we talked about the uncertainty around the pace of the low carbon transition. I wanted to understand whether demand for green jobs will continue to grow as fast as previously projected. So I ask Neil, as the global political landscape changes, what signals can companies send about the long-term demand for these jobs? And what can they do to create more certainty in that space? Here's what he said.

Neil Yeoh: I would say that it is as much a psychological shift in our mindsets as well as an actual shift to what business leaders need to perceive sustainability. Regardless of geopolitics, sustainability is business strategy right now in the 21st century and in the 22nd century. For business leaders to show up, we really need to show that there is a return on investment that sustainability is not a cost center, but a value creation exercise.

Even in an IBM study, it has shown that companies that lead with embedding sustainability into its workforce and organization see a 16% increase in revenue, a 52% higher performance against their peers and are able to attribute 2x the operational cost reductions in their supply chain due to focusing on sustainability regardless of politics.

Lindsey Hall: This idea that we're hearing today that eventually we won't talk about green jobs or sustainable jobs, we'll just talk about jobs and that sustainability will be embedded. This is an idea I've been hearing in other conversations as well. During an interview I did for this podcast at Climate Week NYC, for example, a guest from one of the biggest banks in the Middle East told me he wants to get rid of the term sustainable finance. He gave the example of e-banking and pointed out, we don't really use that term anymore. We just talk about banking. And he wants to see the same thing happen for sustainable finance.

Esther Whieldon: Well, it sounds like Neil and Efrem see a similar direction of travel for sustainable jobs. We've heard from them today about the landscape for these roles. But what about individuals? What advice do Neil and Efrem have for those looking to join the green workforce or bolster their skill sets to meet future demand? First up, here's Efrem's answer.

Neil Yeoh: What we actually see in our data is that a lot of people who are entering their careers are really interested in working on climate, but they didn't necessarily know where to look or how to get a job in the space. One thing I've heard a lot is a focus on jobs that have sustainability in the title or maybe working at a climate tech company. And what our data tell us is, one, some of these jobs are really hard to break into because in many cases, they're looking for folks who may already have sustainability experience. And a lot of these jobs aren't always entry level.

And even the ones that are more junior still might require 3 to 5 years of experience. So one thing I often would tell people early in their career is that there's a lot of skills to develop and a lot of those skills are going to come from a variety of functions, particularly because we see green skills and this growing acknowledgment that many other functions and titles are going to contribute to climate action.

But if you're really interested in doing this work, there are many other titles that may not have sustainability explicitly called out where you could actually do really important work. Using procurement, again, as an example, that's not a function that I think of climate warriors really excited to go into. But when we think of where emissions gains and progress is going to come, so much of it is going to come in supply chain. And we need folks who are really passionate about climate trying to solve that problem and building those important skills because those are clearly the skills that many companies, many employers are going to be looking for in the future.

I think it's also important to realize that many young workers, people early in their careers may have more skills than they realize. One thing that is clear is a lot of young people are familiar with climate change, how climate change is impacting the planet and the risks it poses. The question then becomes how do we translate that climate knowledge, which is the baseline in many ways of climate fluency into how that shows up in your job. If you're a software engineer, we need software engineers not only developing new technology tools to help deliver climate progress, but we also need software engineers who realize that the code they write requires energy. And we need those software engineers to know how to write energy-efficient code and how to measure the energy required to process the code they write.

Esther Whieldon: And here's Neil's advice to individuals.

Neil Yeoh: My advice would differ for mid-career versus younger professionals, and this is coming from our experience. The first piece of advice I'd give for mid-career is perhaps don't quit your job, perhaps get upskilled and see if there's a lateral move internally that you can shift into for sustainability as we found that more than 2/3 of sustainability leads are internally hired and less than half have sustainability skills, so you should also get upskilled.

For younger professionals, I would rethink academic programs, if I was to speak like that because academic programs are great for things that move a bit slower, say, policy or the sciences. But if you're looking for up-to-date industry skills, there are opportunities like micro credentials, such as what we offer but also other opportunities online that make it more affordable, effective to get upskilled and move into those sustainability analyst manager and director roles.

However, the one thing I will say is that there is a green skills movement within the workforce, but it is showing up even more in traditional roles that are getting upskilled and green, not necessarily the job titles with sustainability, ESG or climate within them. We can't get jaded in the sense of wanting that title where we realize that we could actually do a lot within our roles if we go out there and creatively get upskilled through credentialing and through our own means.

Esther Whieldon: So we heard from Efrem and Neil that sustainability and green-related skill sets are becoming standard parts of job descriptions and functions. We heard that companies and governments have a big role to play here in driving demand and helping the workforce prepare for the needs of tomorrow. We'll include a link in our show notes to previous episodes we did on this topic of sustainable jobs. And please stay tuned as we continue tracking this topic.

Lindsey Hall: And before we sign off, some exciting news, please check out our show notes for a link to register for our upcoming live podcast event in New York City, February 6. We'll be celebrating our 7-year podcast anniversary with an in-person recording session, a big relaunch, networking, and we'll be unveiling our new podcast name. You don't want to miss it.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ESG Insider. If you like what you heard today, please subscribe, share and leave us or review wherever you get your podcasts.

Esther Whieldon: And a special thanks to our agency partner, the 199. See you next time.

Copyright ©2025 by S&P Global 

This piece was published by S&P Global Sustainable1, a part of S&P Global.    

DISCLAIMER 

By accessing this Podcast, I acknowledge that S&P GLOBAL makes no warranty, guarantee, or representation as to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information featured in this Podcast. The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice. Unless specifically stated otherwise, S&P GLOBAL does not endorse, approve, recommend, or certify any information, product, process, service, or organization presented or mentioned in this Podcast, and information from this Podcast should not be referenced in any way to imply such approval or endorsement. The third party materials or content of any third party site referenced in this Podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions, standards or policies of S&P GLOBAL. S&P GLOBAL assumes no responsibility or liability for the accuracy or completeness of the content contained in third party materials or on third party sites referenced in this Podcast or the compliance with applicable laws of such materials and/or links referenced herein. Moreover, S&P GLOBAL makes no warranty that this Podcast, or the server that makes it available, is free of viruses, worms, or other elements or codes that manifest contaminating or destructive properties. 

S&P GLOBAL EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL LIABILITY OR RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR OTHER DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF ANY INDIVIDUAL'S USE OF, REFERENCE TO, RELIANCE ON, OR INABILITY TO USE, THIS PODCAST OR THE INFORMATION PRESENTED IN THIS PODCAST.