How can recruitment strategies match the pace and scale of the green transition?

Careers linked to booming clean tech, circular, and renewable energy industries have been found to offer both stability and long-term progression prospects as investment continues to grow and green markets expand.

Yet such is the pace of the net zero transition that demand for 'green' talent with the knowledge and experience required to drive climate action and boost resilience has increased twice as fast as the UK's supply of workers with related skills.

LinkedIn's Green Skills Report 2025 warned that while the 'green workforce' is growing, it is doing so nowhere near fast enough to meet surging demand for skills as corporate climate action continues to advance. Conversely, the UK job market is facing significant pressures with unemployment growing, AI disrupting traditional hiring processes, and carbon intensive industries facing the prospect of job losses and financial strain as the net zero transition gathers pace.

With growing numbers of green businesses facing recruitment and retention challenges, BusinessGreen's latest Spotlight webinar this week gathered together leading experts to discuss what it takes to develop an attractive and effective recruitment strategy for the next phase of the green transition. Hosted in association with the Jobs That Matter campaign from Octopus Energy, Spotlight on Skills: Effective recruitment and retention for the future economy also explored how to explain how every role can be a 'sustainability' role and how to attract more young people into the industries that will shape the future economy.      

What are 'green' jobs and skills?

Olivia Wray, global head of talent acquisition at Octopus Energy, explains that as the net zero transition accelerates, the need to clarify what is meant by a "green" job or skill becomes more pressing. "It can feel quite narrow, and quite confusing," she says. "Maybe people picture things like tree planting or a tiny set of environmental roles, when actually what we're really talking about is something much bigger. It's a shift across the whole economy."

While these 'green' jobs include the likes of electricians, engineers, and those working directly on clean technologies, the term also covers software developers, those working in customer support, and operations teams. "The reality is, all of these jobs should be getting more sustainable, and every sector should be moving in that direction," adds Wray. "The tipping point has happened."

Joshua Deru, just transition lead at the UK's Climate Change Committee, adds that the UK's climate advisors have sought to break down so-called 'green skills' for different sectors. For between 60 and 80 per cent of roles in the likes of the services industry or office-based roles, Deru stresses green skills changes are likely to amount to small tweaks to day-to-day activities, such as a postman delivering in an electric vehicle or a lawyer learning about new regulations. 

However, for around a fifth of jobs - in sectors like agriculture, farming, land use, manufacturing, steel, and heavy industry - more substantial changes will be required if workers are to manage new technologies and fundamental changes to their core processes. Moreover, Deru explained that an estimated 10 per cent of jobs will be linked to the rapid growth of new technologies and renewables,  citing installers of heat pumps and electric vehicle charge points, as well as clean tech manufacturing, as examples of key areas of demand.

Katie Neck, managing director and founder of Sustained Futures, stresses that without a national framework for future skills - whether that's green skills or AI skills - it is difficult for organisations to identify and plug skills gaps. "This isn't about not printing emails and turning off the lights," she says. "It's making sure the roles in a business outside of the sustainability team, have the right skills to get to a net zero target."

How big is the challenge?

For Deru, the question of what net zero means for jobs and skills is too big for businesses and policymakers to ignore. For starters, the CCC estimates the UK will need between 300,000 and 700,000 extra jobs across the economy in order to meet its legally binding target of hitting net zero by 2050. Much of this demand will be for practical roles such as electricians and engineers – a recent report found just one-in-four UK-based vehicle technicians were qualified to work on electric vehicles, for instance. "If you don't have the right people or the right skills in the right place, you can't install heat pumps," Deru warns. "You can only install a certain number a year, and that physically blocks progress, but it also pushes up the costs."

While the government's Clean Energy Jobs Plan recently set out its vision to double the UK's green energy workforce by 2030, Deru warns it does not yet cover crucial sectors such as transport, land use and agriculture. "We'll be looking for further action from the government," he says.

The so-called 'green skills gap' not only threatens the deployment of critical infrastructure and clean tech, but could scupper corporates' climate targets. Neck - who has worked with the likes of Arsenal Football Club, Adobe, and the United Nations - cites research by KPMG that 94 per cent of companies can't implement ESG plans because they don't have the right skills.

Demystifying green careers

Wray adds that one of the biggest challenges within the broader green skills agenda is providing access to early career opportunities for young people who are committed to tackling climate change but may not regard working on the net zero transition as a feasible career. "We think about wildfires, we think about droughts, we think about the hots getting hotter, the wets getting wetter, the dry is getting drier, and they can see it," says Wray. "They care about the world they're inheriting. The challenge is how do we get kids and youngsters to understand that there are job opportunities here."

Wray stresses that helping young people understand what skills they're going to need for the future and showing them that good jobs exist in the green economy has to start long before students think about leaving school. In fact, she explains how Octopus has sought to engage children as young as year five or six through various outreach programs. "If we're serious about delivering the transition at pace, we can't just think about hiring people that already exist in the workforce, we have to think about the future workforce," she says. "That means engaging people while they're still in school, before they even potentially pick GCSE and A levels."

Though the UK has long treated degrees as the default route into a stable and well paid career - particularly in the burgeoning low carbon economy - longstanding stigma around apprenticeships is finally being challenged and alternative routes into the green economy are emerging. Over 800 apprenticeships in engineering, analyst, and corporate positions are to be offered by the UK's energy network operators this year, according to the Energy Networks Association, joining more than 2,400 currently employed across the sector, for instance.

"People are going to university, spending a lot of money to get a degree, coming out the other end, and finding the job that they thought they were going to go into doesn't exist anymore because of how fast the world is changing and new technologies are coming out," says Wray. "This transition requires a huge range of different skills, not just one academic pathway. We need engineers, we need scientists, we need software developers, and yes, we find some great people that do come through university. But we also need electricians, installers and builders, operations teams that are helping our customers."

Changing perceptions

For Neck, green jobs and skills still face several "branding" and perception challenges. At a very basic level, she explains Sustained Futures deliberately avoids using the word "training" to avoid being seen as a tick box exercise. "We want to be reskilling and upskilling the workforce for the future skills needs," she says.

More broadly, she argues a consensus exists among young market entrants that green jobs are most likely to be gardeners or tree surgeon. "But actually, the journey that we take them on is you can you have a sustainability role at a company like Adidas," she says. "I don't believe that everyone does need green skills, and not every job is a green job. But there are specific roles and departments like procurement teams, which are the unsung heroes of this movement. We really need to make sure that procurement teams and supply chain teams have the skills for the future and that they're upskilled to be real strategic change makers in their business."

She adds that a crucial part of her work is undertaking green skills audits to identify what teams need in order to move the needle with their sustainability and climate efforts. This means establishing where a company is on its net zero journey, identifying leadership structures, and determining climate and nature fluency across a whole business. "Based on that, we build a pathway," she says.

Hiring challenges and the 'passion-pay gap'

While there are steps companies can take to identify and address internal skills shortages, invest in up-skilling, and help candidates overcome barriers to green jobs, Wray argues efforts to tackle green skills shortages must be accompanied by a wider rethink of the UK jobs market. For example, she states that while there are currently around 150 million job applications made in the UK every year, around 78 per cent of applicants withdraw during the interview process, just over a quarter do not show up on their first day, and 41 per cent leave within the first five weeks.

"It's maybe not necessarily just a hiring problem, we've got a jobs problem too," she says. "We've got rising unemployment - around 150 jobs being lost every day - and time to hire in the UK has doubled to around 55 days. When you combine inefficient hiring processes and people leaving in the first few months, it costs the UK economy around £75bn every year - about £400,000 every day. I think a big part of attracting the next generation is trying to fix hiring itself and removing barriers for people."

That means more clarity on what a role entails, streamlined application processes that do not necessarily adhere to the traditional CV dominated approach, and a concerted effort to develop a more diverse workforce that is welcoming to people from a wider range of backgrounds. 

The same principles apply when trying to retain experienced staff already working within the green economy. While the UK's environmental professionals remain passionate and committed to their work and the wider impact they can have, many feel they are underpaid, under-supported, and have fallen into a so-called 'passion pay gap' where their commitment to the climate cause can be taken advantage of by employers. A recent study found that while just over three quarters of respondents said they were 'satisfied' or 'neutral' about their current salary, 48 per cent said their pay did not reflect their level of experience or responsibility.

"People want to work on problems that matter," says Wray. "They want to work somewhere where they feel like their work has a real impact. And that's a wonderful thing. The risk with any purpose driven sector is this passion pay gap - where people care deeply about the mission that they might accept lower pay or worse conditions, in some cases, just to be a part of it. I think that's something the green economy needs to be really careful about, because if the transition is going to scale, there need to be good, sustainable careers - not just jobs that people take because they feel morally obliged to."

The green economy faces a skills challenge that could yet derail the net zero transition. But it also has a huge amount to offer young people, those mid-career, and those already working at green businesses. Better promotion of jobs that really matter to a wider audience has to be the first step in attracting more people into a sector that is changing the world for the better.  

BusinessGreen's webinar - Spotlight on Skills: Effective recruitment and retention for the future economy - was hosted in association with Jobs That Matter by Octopus Energy, and can be watched back in full here.

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