Green skills in the labour market: what ESCO says

The wrong starting assumption

When green transition and employment come up, the recurring image is one of new trades: panel installers, circular economy technicians, energy certification specialists. Those are real occupations, but they are the small part of the phenomenon.

The way ESCO -- the European classification of skills and occupations, with over 13,000 skills and 3,000 profiles -- treats green skills tells a different story. Sustainability-related competences are not concentrated in one sector: they are distributed across occupations nobody would classify as environmental.

What that means concretely

A designer who has to account for material life cycles, a buyer assessing a supplier's chain, an accountant reporting sustainability metrics, an IT manager sizing infrastructure against energy consumption: none of these roles is a green job, and all of them require sustainability competences.

That distribution has a precise consequence: demand for green skills grows faster than demand for green jobs. The transformation happens inside existing occupations, not alongside them.

Why a competence framework beats a sector classification

This is where reasoning by sector shows its limit. If training follows sectoral classification, it goes where the green jobs are -- energy, waste, environment -- and leaves uncovered everything else, which is where most of the demand sits.

GreenComp solves the problem because it is not sectoral. Its 12 competences across 4 areas -- values, complexity, imagination, action -- describe capabilities applying to any trade. Systems thinking serves an engineer and a teacher alike; assessing the cascading effects of a decision serves whoever designs and whoever purchases.

How to use the two together

ESCO to understand where. Start from an occupation and look at which sustainability-related competences are associated with the profile. The result is often surprising, and it serves to justify training investment in roles that did not look concerned.

GreenComp to understand what. Once the need is identified, GreenComp says how the competence is built and at what level to develop it. ESCO names, GreenComp describes.

EQF to understand at what level. If the pathway leads to a qualification, the EQF level makes it readable outside your own country.

The risk to avoid

Training greenwashing: renaming existing courses by adding "sustainable" to the title. A supply chain management course does not become green skills training because its name changed. It becomes so if its learning objectives anchor to identified GreenComp competences and if assessment makes them observable.

The check is always the same: at the end, can the person do something different, or say something different?

Explore the 4 areas and 12 competences of GreenComp on the GreenComp portal at ExplorerHub, and the related ESCO occupations directly on the portal.