The green jobs myth

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It seems that the concept of green jobs has taken over the workforce development conversation at every level. I’ll confess up-front that I take a contrarian view: There is no such a thing as a green job. Rather, there are green markets.

The job skills needed to do “green” work are not fundamentally different from those needed for traditional work. A few years ago, I was working on an energy generation project at a wastewater treatment plant. The electrician who came from a lumber mill to my green project (we were using the methane gas from the digester) didn’t change his stripes along the way. He was hired because he knew how to program a complex piece of control equipment.

It’s the marketplace that determines how skills are put to use and how green our jobs are. The same environmental engineers who site pipelines are lending their skills to siting wind turbines. Similarly, the attorneys putting together deals for renewable energy projects often gained their skills doing traditional utility work. Design and construction firms can use their skills to build either traditional buildings or green ones. It all depends on who’s buying.

When it comes to jobs, we need to talk in terms of skills, not sectors. Saying that there is huge future demand in the energy sector is as unhelpful to a young person or a worker needing retraining as saying that there is a huge future demand in health care: are we talking about billing specialists or neurosurgeons? When asked, as I often am, about how one goes about finding a green job or getting into “sustainability,” I answer that the real question is “what kind of work do you want to do?” Green markets demand the same types of skills as regular markets, so decide first whether you want to work with your hands as a tradesperson, or be an engineer, accountant, sales person, marketer, lawyer, IT manager, or secretary. Then get the skills that will make someone want to hire you.

To the extent that some green jobs, such as a wind turbine mechanic or efficiency expert, require specialized skills, those are add-ons to the fundamentals, not substitutes for them. And while some people claim that green training will enable workers to bring different attitudes to their jobs, that’s fine — if they can first do those jobs well.

Another thing that seems to be forgotten is that markets don’t hire people, companies do. We are hearing that there will be a huge future demand for green jobs to rebuild our energy infrastructure or to implement energy efficiency. But I find that there is often a conceptual leap over exactly who will be doing the hiring. Unless the fundamentals are in place, such as supportive economic policies, business incentives, and access to capital, we can’t assume that those jobs will materialize here where we live. It is a distinct disservice to entice workers into getting specialized training unless we know that the jobs will be there.

When I was senior in college, my classmates and I found a pamphlet touting the growing demand for psychology professionals, our chosen major. This made for a good joke — just a few years after the pamphlet was written, that rosy outlook had vanished. Some went on to graduate school anyway. The rest of us went out into the world trusting that our liberal arts education would do us some generalized good (which in my case, it did). Later, when my own son was in college studying population issues, he reasoned that there would be jobs available to him because “we need to save the world.” I agreed, but suggested that that didn’t mean anyone would hire him unless he had solid skills to offer, and that a parallel course of study might come in handy (which it did).

I trust that most workforce and economic development professionals know that there is a difference between green markets, green companies, and green jobs, but they are under political pressure to categorize and measure green employment, and to chase funding for a share of the green jobs pie. To the extent that calling jobs “green” attracts young people to technical fields and the skilled trades, I’m all for it. And if calling jobs “green” increases the funding for job training, even better. But the danger is getting caught up in our own rhetoric and thereby doing young people and job seekers a disservice.

We need to honestly communicate to trainees and job seekers that green jobs are just like any other job when it comes down to doing the work — so they’d better pick work they like doing. Then we should train for specialized job skills only if we are confident that the jobs will actually be there when the student is ready. And finally, we need to educate for an unknown future, providing a set of foundational skills that can be flexibly applied to changing circumstances, changing markets, and changing job colors.

Robert Grott is the executive director of the Northwest Environmental Business Council.