The Green Skills Gap: 22 Minutes with Efrem Bycer

The green economy is generating millions of new jobs — but the workers trained to fill them aren’t keeping pace. According to LinkedIn data, job postings requiring at least one green skill are growing twice as fast as the number of workers who have those skills. That gap has real consequences, not just for the planet, but for workers, businesses, and economies navigating one of the biggest transitions in the history of work.

Efrem Bycer leads workforce and climate policy partnerships at LinkedIn, where he helps policymakers, employers, and workers understand and navigate the major shifts reshaping the world of work. EARTHDAY.ORG Director of Education Bryce Coon — who first connected with Bycer at COP climate conferences — sat down with him to talk about what the green skills gap means for everyday workers, which industries are changing fastest, and why the transition is proving more durable than the politics around it.

Efrem Bycer leads workforce and climate policy partnerships at LinkedIn, where he researches and advises on the intersection of labor markets, climate change, and economic transition. LinkedIn’s annual Green Skills Report tracks how sustainability-related skills are evolving across industries worldwide.

Earth Day 2026 and its theme, Our Power, Our Planet, highlights how people everywhere — from classrooms and local neighborhoods to national institutions — can help drive environmental progress through education, advocacy, and community engagement.

Q: Tell us about your role at LinkedIn and how your work connects to the transition to a greener economy.

My job at LinkedIn is to lead our workforce and climate policy partnerships, and that covers a lot of ground. The way I break it down: I work to help policymakers, employers, and workers understand and navigate the biggest transitions in the world of work — things like AI and climate change. You really can’t talk about one without the other right now. And if you’re working, both of those are showing up in your work in all sorts of interesting ways, especially in the skills you need to do your job.

Q: LinkedIn’s data shows job postings requiring at least one green skill are growing about twice as fast as the number of workers with those skills. What does that “green skills gap” mean for workers and economies around the world?

The world has made a couple of significant commitments — tripling renewable energy production, doubling energy efficiency — and increasingly there’s also a commitment around making sure we have companies and economies that are resilient enough to deal with the impacts of climate change. All of those things require a workforce to get them done.

What we’re seeing is that employers, governments, and companies are investing, and the demand for workers with the skills to do that work is growing rapidly — twice as fast as the supply of workers with those skills. So that puts us, first and foremost, at a question of: can we actually do the things we’ve committed to doing when it comes to climate change?

But there’s also a real economic dimension here. When we look at the LinkedIn hiring rate — basically a measure of how fast people change jobs — workers with green skills or green titles have a hiring rate that is 46.6% higher than the workforce overall. That’s huge. That’s a real, significant difference. So from my perspective, what that says is not only are we at risk of not achieving what we say we need to do for the planet, but we’re leaving serious economic opportunity on the table if we’re not helping workers get those skills.

Q: You’ve said green skills are no longer limited to environmental jobs. What are some of the most surprising industries where they’re already showing up?

One of the things we saw in our research this past year was that for the first time, the majority of green hires had green skills but not necessarily green titles. What that tells us clearly is that green skills are increasingly mainstream — and they’re going mainstream because they help workers do things that companies care about every day.

What do companies care about? Being flexible, being adaptable, especially in a rapidly changing world. Workers with green skills know how to deal with change. Companies also care deeply about resilience, especially in supply chains. And energy costs are going up.

Here are a few examples of jobs where we’ve seen rapid growth in green skills — jobs that maybe don’t immediately strike you as climate-focused. First: supply chain manager. When you think about where most companies have their emissions — their scope three — they’re in the supply chain. So it’s really no surprise that sustainable procurement skills are among the fastest-growing green skills on earth. It comes down to two things: how do you decarbonize the supply chain, and how do you make sure it’s resilient? Think about a company that sources spice crops from thousands of small farmers in parts of the world increasingly at risk of drought and flooding. If you don’t have a resilient supply chain, you have a real business problem. That supply chain manager now has to think about how to build the capacity of those small farmers to use regenerative agriculture and more resilient farming practices. That’s a fundamentally different job than it was just a few years ago, when the focus was getting X amount of crop at Y price by Z date.

Second: software engineering. We’ve seen rapid growth of energy management skills among software engineers, and for a clear reason. There’s a lot of resource intensity in AI. Companies are aware of that, and they know that small increases in code efficiency can have real major impacts — not just for the planet, but for their bottom line, given how much they’re investing in AI infrastructure.

Third: insurance. I live in Southern California, so I think about wildfires a lot. But think about any part of the country, any part of the world, where flood or fire risk is real. Insurance companies think about risk all the time. They’ve had to figure out how to build teams that can effectively assess climate risk. If you have to insure any physical asset, climate risk is simply one of the risks you have to think about now.

Q: For people who don’t view themselves as environmentalists, why should they care about green skills?

First and foremost: workers with these skills have an advantage in the labor market, and the labor market is getting tighter. Hiring is down from a few years ago. If you’re thinking about getting a job or getting your next one, being able to demonstrate that you can think about efficiency, find opportunities in challenging situations, and navigate ambiguity — those are all things we’d call green skills. And it turns out they’re green skills because they have a positive impact on the planet, but they’re also just things that are important to companies overall.

Energy management skills are another example. Finding efficiency, especially on energy, is going to be increasingly important as we go through more electrification and the total cost of energy for a company continues to rise.

Q: Are schools, universities, and training programs adapting fast enough to teach the green skills the job market needs?

The first thing I’d highlight is something you touched on — young people really do have a passion for this work. What we see in our data is that young people want to work on solving the biggest problems they see around them. They want the skills and knowledge to make a serious impact on those challenges, and climate change is definitely one of them.

The question then is whether training providers and education institutions are adapting their curriculum — both for what students are looking for and, perhaps even more importantly, for what employers are actually demanding. And I think the jury is still out on that. Education institutions often lag behind what industry is looking for.

A couple of things they should be doing: first, making sure there are fields of study where people can learn the skills for the new types of jobs being created. LinkedIn data shows that about 20% of the jobs that exist today didn’t exist in 2000 — so there’s a real need for new fields of study. But even more broadly, we’re estimating that by 2030, 85% of jobs are going to see at least a 25% change in the skills they require. That’s a lot of curriculum to update.

Take civil engineering — a career field that’s existed for over a century. A few summers ago in New York, the Third Avenue Bridge between the Bronx and Manhattan couldn’t close all the way because it was so hot that the bridge had expanded beyond what the original designers had accounted for. Those designers were working more than a hundred years ago. A civil engineering program still has to teach you how to build and design a bridge — but now it has to introduce new types of risk, new challenges, possibly new materials, because we have to consider that a piece of infrastructure built today needs to last 100 years under very different climate conditions than what was historically assumed.

Q: Many workers worry about being left behind. What does the data show about whether their skills are transferable to the green economy?

A few ways to answer this. One: you can be in marketing, accounting, or sales — we need those skills in the green economy. Those companies still need to find customers and manage their finances.

Two: workers who currently work in energy — even traditional, fossil fuel-based energy — are energy workers, and that’s a core part of who they are. We need a lot of people to work on energy. There are already strong examples of this. A geothermal company in the United States hired a significant number of people out of the oil and gas industry to help build and operate their facility. The skills transfer more than people assume.

But here’s the broader point: this space is growing rapidly. When you have relatively new types of jobs growing as fast as green jobs are, you can’t rely only on people who’ve done them before. We featured a solar asset management company in our 2024 Green Skills report that kept poaching employees from competitors because the demand was so intense — and that’s not a sustainable way to build a talent pool for an industry. When they broke the job down into its tasks and skills, they found other pockets of untapped talent that could excel at doing that work.

This is part of a broader movement around skills-based hiring — hiring people not for their degree or their most recent job title, but for what they can actually do. In this transition, we’re going to need a lot of that. A lot of people have the passion and interest to work on climate. The question is how we match that passion with the skills they already have to fill the jobs that need to be done.

Q: Your research shows women are underrepresented in green jobs. Why does that gap exist, and what are we losing if we don’t address it?

First and foremost: we are facing one of the biggest challenges on the globe, and if half the global workforce isn’t equally able to participate in solving it, we’re putting the solutions at risk.

Second: there’s a lot of economic opportunity for people with green skills, and if fewer women have those skills, fewer women are going to be able to take advantage of that opportunity. We also know that more of the jobs likely to be displaced by AI are held by women — and a lot of green economy jobs are going to be more AI-resilient. So if women are less likely to be in the green economy, that’s a compounding economic risk.

There’s also a structural challenge. A lot of the jobs in energy, building, and construction are predominantly male-dominated roles that very few women hold to begin with. That’s not going to fix itself. One concrete example of what can help: pairing childcare assistance with apprenticeship programs so that more women are actually able to participate in those pipelines. We need more people working on energy and climate, full stop — and that means actively supporting women into these roles.

Q: When government policy pulls back on climate investment, what happens to green hiring? Does it slow down, or does the private sector pick up the slack?

Companies are looking for certainty. That’s ultimately what drives decision-making, especially for long-term investments in energy infrastructure. Political uncertainty — which we’ve had a lot of recently, with elections around the world — is something businesses generally don’t invest around.

That said, a lot of companies operate globally. What happens in one country may not match what happens in another, and companies may continue to invest in renewables or address climate change because it’s a priority in other markets they care about, even if one or two countries have walked back their climate commitments.

What I can say is that we’ve been tracking the LinkedIn hiring rate, and through at least the first half of 2025, the hiring advantage for workers with green skills remained strong. It decreased slightly, but we don’t yet know if that’s a sustained trend or a response to uncertainty.

What people kept asking me at Climate Week was: is green hiring still a thing, even as the political discourse is pulling back? And my answer is clearly yes. Because companies — regardless of whether they’re publicly sticking to climate commitments — have to get this stuff done anyway. They have to become more resilient because they can see what climate shocks and climate risk can do to a business. They see real opportunities in the energy transition they want to realize. And they want to control costs, and energy efficiency is a core green skill. Maybe they call it something different. Maybe they use different words. But climate is material, and that drives business decisions and informs what kind of workforce these companies need — even if it’s not the headline they’re shouting about.

Q: Looking ahead, what gives you confidence that the transition to a green workforce will continue?

Young people really care about this, and I’m genuinely excited about the number of people who have reached out saying, “I want to work on this — how do I make an impact?” I don’t want to suggest this is only something young people care about — we see all kinds of people motivated by it. But the question of how we help people see themselves in the variety of roles that could use the skills they already have to drive climate impact — that’s where there’s a lot of opportunity.

I’m also encouraged by the fact that a lot of employers are still treating this as a key priority — not just because of public climate commitments, but because they know it matters to their business. And when companies decide something is important to their business, they build decision models around it, again and again.

I’ll come back to that stat from earlier: the majority of green hires today have green skills but not green titles. That tells us this is becoming increasingly embedded across companies — and that’s a good thing. This can’t be something siloed in one part of a business. It has to be a set of capabilities distributed across the entire organization.

Q: For Earth Day 2026, what is LinkedIn doing to mark the moment, and how can initiatives like this help accelerate green skills development worldwide?

Every month, LinkedIn has what we call an “en day” — a day with dedicated programming around a different topic. April is Environment Day at LinkedIn, and it always lines up with Earth Day.

For us, it’s a time when we talk about our own company’s climate commitments around energy, water, and waste, and make sure our employees understand what those commitments are. People want to work at companies that care about this stuff, and that matters. We also do programming at our office locations — environmental cleanups in the community, things like that.

But beyond the single day: we’re always thinking about how we help the broader workforce develop these skills. We unlock LinkedIn Learning content around green skills so people can access it during and around Earth Day. And the reason that matters is that most people are going to learn green skills by seeing how those skills apply to the jobs they already hold — that’s where most people actually put green skills to use. LinkedIn Learning can be really useful for that.

So for us, Earth Day is a moment to step back from the day-to-day, spend some time engaging with the environment around us, and also learn about the skills we can all use to take more climate action — starting right where we are.