Measuring green jobs and skills in the UK - Zayn Meghji & Liz Gallagher

Find out more at https://www.oecd.org/en/events/2024/07/skills-without-colours-how-to-navigate-the-green-transition-in-local-labour-markets.html

1. Nesta.org.uk @nesta_uk
Measuring Green Jobs and Skills in the UK

OECD Spatial Productivity Lab webinar - 10/07/2024
Zayn Meghji, India Kerle, Liz Gallagher

2. Agenda
1.Introduction to Nesta & the Open Jobs
Observatory
2.Extracting skills from job adverts
3.Measuring ‘greenness’ in job adverts

3. Nesta design, test and scale new solutions to society’s biggest problems.
We have three mission areas:
A fairer start - narrowing the
outcome gap between
children growing up in
disadvantage and the national
average.
A healthy life - increase the
average number of healthy
years lived in the UK, while
narrowing health inequalities.
A sustainable future -
accelerate the UK’s transition to
a low-carbon, productive
economy by cutting UK
household emissions, and
reducing skills mismatches in the
labour market.

4. What is the Open Jobs Observatory?
The Open Jobs Observatory (OJO) is a database of online job
adverts.

We began collecting adverts in January 2021 and we now have
several million postings. Adverts are collected on a daily basis.

We have built a suite of algorithms to extract information from the job
adverts, including locations, industries, and skills.

The project has been funded by organisations including the
Department of Education, the ONS and the UKRI.

5. We have collected over 7,000,000 job adverts from across the UK since
2021…

6. Skills in job adverts

7. Developing a way to extract and analyse skills in job adverts
The problem. Information on skills can help understand regional skill
specialities, the skills required for a given occupation and to help plan for
skill shortages. Often skills information is paywalled.



Our approach. We created open source algorithms to extract skills from
job adverts and created analysis tools for others to explore the skills being
asked for in our dataset of job adverts.

8. ESCO taxonomy
[1] = Communicate effectively
[2] = Use spreadsheets program
[3] = Give a presentation
[4] = Leading a team
[5] = Supervise a team
You will need to be able to
communicate well. We
would also like Excel and
presentation skills. You will
be leading and training a
team in this role.
Experience in the financial
sector is a plus. Please
apply.
Identify skills and
experiences
You will need to be able to
communicate well
[1]
. We
would also like Excel
[2]
and
presentation skills
[3]
. You will
be leading and training a
team
[4,5]
in this role.
Experience in the financial
sector is a plus. Please
apply.
Map skills to a
taxonomy
Extracting skills from job adverts

9. Insights
Most common skills asked for
Regional focus
Occupation
focus

10. Green jobs

11. Developing a way to measure and identify green jobs to help grow the
sector…
The problem. A lack of good, bottom-up data on green jobs has led to
narrow conversation about the workforce transition to Net Zero, focussing
on a small number of green jobs.

Our approach. We tried to address this by measuring the greenness of a
job based on multiple dimensions.

12. GREEN TIMESHARE: 62.5
Senior Sustainability Consultant


You will work as part of a peer group
of specialists and project managers,
supported by a strong and diverse
team of consultants and senior
leaders. We are a organisation that is
part of the architecture sector and is
focused on the build environment. The
role requires strong skills in
sustainability reporting and
knowledge of climate change. It also
requires a sound understanding of
qualitative/quantitative analysis and
excellent report writing and
communication skills.
Occupation greenness measures2152/05,
Environment
professionals
GHG PER UNIT EMISSIONS: 0.02
Industry greenness measures
711,
Architectural
and
engineering
activities and
related
technical
consultancy

GREEN_ENTS: [sustainability reporting, knowledge of
climate change]

PROP_GREEN: 0.29

Skill greenness measures
[skills list]
We use data science methods to extract and standardise information from job adverts and
join this information to existing datasets.

13. For around 4 million of these job adverts we have extracted 3 continuous
green measures…

-The proportion of skills being asked for in the job advert that are
green (using ESCO and O*NET data).

-The average time spent on green tasks for this occupation (using
ONS data).

-The average GHG emissions per unit of economic output for this
industry (using ONS data).
This has allowed to create new insights on the greenness of different occupations…

14. Key findings

15. There’s no such thing as a job that is ‘green’ or ‘not green’...

16. Green skills are still a small part of most jobs…
Environmental
consultants
Conservationists
Application
designers

17. Certain green skills are asked for more than others

18. Cross-functional skills play a crucial role in greener jobs…
The top 5 skills that most commonly co-occur with green skills in green
occupations:
1.Advise customers
2.Quality assurance procedures
3.Work in teams
4.Coordinating activities with others
5.Provide improvement strategies

19. Measuring ‘greenness’ offers a new perspective on the regional green jobs story…
Measuring and mapping 'greenness' reveals a regional green jobs story,
driven more by large manufacturing and industrial towns than by major cities.

20. Thank you
for
listening!
Further reading:
●How we extracted skills from job adverts
and links to the tools created
●How we assigned job adverts to different
industries
●How we assigned job adverts to different
occupations
●How we extracted green skills from job
adverts
●The Green Jobs Explorer tool