Sustainability leaders are on the rise. Green jobs are growing at four times the rate of the rest of the UK market – and the search for fresh new talent has never been more competitive.
Securing talented people for the net-zero and sustainability economy is becoming more important than ever and whether it’s booming electric vehicle sales, the arrival of the UK’s first gigafactory, a need for more green energy, or panic from marketers keen to avoid greenwashing, the upward trend is unlikely to slow down.
New ONS data reveals that around 526,000 people in the UK are employed in full-time green jobs in the UK. Around a quarter of working adults (27%) also said that they would describe any part of their job as a green job, while 1 in 20 said that all or part of their job relates to ‘green activities’.
However, the challenges for those who dare to step into the industry (or who add sustainability into the roster of qualifications they already have in their current role), are astronomical.
Over half of sustainability professionals lament a lack of budget or interest and feel that their role often continues to be seen as wishy washy, despite actually being increasingly technical.
When is a green job not a green job
Dealing with a range of clients from across the advertising sector, Propeller Group sustainability and social impact practice director Gill Browne says she is keen to help her clients fully understand the nuances of any job which involves sustainability.
“One of the key barriers to driving decarbonisation is that doing so is incredibly complex. Few in modern business would disagree that it’s important to lower our carbon emissions, but understanding of what that means is still very low,” she says.
“This carries forwards into our workplaces. Ultimately the language of sustainability within businesses is highly complicated – there are extremely technical concepts, measurement systems and jargon, which means there can be quite a wide gap between the experts in a business and the people trying to instigate change across their organisations.”
“While the job of sustainability reporting might well fall to the chief financial officer (CFO) and their team, the job of communicating and driving change often sits within marketing or internal comms or even the people team, when there’s no dedicated chief sustainability officer (CSO) bridging them all.”
While not officially considered to be ‘green jobs’, these are the teams really responsible for making the changes, according to Browne.
“This is why the full business needs to upskill around decarbonisation – and most are woefully behind on this.”
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Source: ONS; September 27, 2023
Sustainability leaders cannot bunk maths
For Nicola Stopps, who runs sustainability consultancy firm Simply Sustainable, there are positive signals that the talking points and requirements of the industry have evolved over time to become more fact-driven.
“In recent years there has been an acceptance that sustainability is a wide, holistic subject requiring different skills and experience,” she explains.
“Most sustainability professionals are educated to a degree level, reading a wide variety of topics and then undertaking additional qualifications in sustainability or ESG, particularly over the last five years.”
She expects to see specific qualifications on the subject from the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment, which is the UK’s largest professional body for environmental practitioners.
“I would say from experience, you need to have a growth mindset and also a lot of optimism,” Stopps says, explaining how easy it can be to feel disheartened with constant policy changes, complex jargon and PR risks.
Despite having the best of intentions, it would not be unusual to learn that some carefully considered plans don’t reduce carbon emissions as much as had been previously hoped (as happened in the case of Lego, when the toy giant backtracked on its plans to make the colourful bricks from recycled plastic).
Or that – despite an ostensibly fantastic and accessible comms strategy – you still get heavily criticised for using the term “carbon neutral” as it is now deemed dubious and misleading, as in Apple’s case.
‘A lot that’s not commonly found in one package’
Managing director of sustainable recruiters Allen and York Lester Lockyer – who recruits for sustainability roles across large and small businesses in a range of sectors including retail and FMCG – also agrees that businesses are required to be more robust.
“Yes and no,” he says, when asked about whether sustainability roles have become more about the science and less about marketing and comms then they used to be.
“In the past there was an element of marketing but really one could say external comms. It’s still very much the case now that being able to communicate strategy is important,” he begins.
“The rigour with which one now has to approach reporting and science has also increased significantly, where typically a sustainability director was more focused on external comms. By design companies are now asking for a lot of skills that are not commonly found in one package.”
Of course, some businesses have been able to diversify their workforce by recruiting internally, taking advantage of the fact that people acquire core sustainability skills as job needs, roles and requirements become increasingly characterised by the climate crisis.
Balancing fears of saying too little and making a regrettable or even catastrophic move, businesses looking to level up their sustainability strategy must take crucial steps towards practising sustainability throughout their organisations.
And to do that, they need the right people – who are able to understand the science while simultaneously being creative, persuasive and rigorous. No biggie…
