Let's get green: understanding green skills and jobs through online job advertisements

Green jobs and skills are pivotal to global and European efforts toward an environmentally sustainable economy and climate neutrality. Understanding their characteristics is vital for designing policies that address workforce challenges during this transition. Existing literature often analyzes green jobs using occupations as a proxy, either categorizing entire occupations as green or assigning greenness scores based on tasks. This study extends the analysis by focusing on green skills, leveraging data from Eurostat’s Web Intelligence Hub on Online Job Advertisements (OJA). This dataset allows us to observe skill requirements at the job advertisement level, revealing heterogeneity within occupations. We analyze green OJAs—ads featuring at least one green skill—at the ISCO IV-digit level across 26 European countries (2019–2023). We find that green OJAs are linked to higher education requirements, higher wages, and lower experience demands. Additionally, introducing an occupation greenness score, we find that green OJAs in brown occupations (jobs with zero greenness) also command a wage premium. The granularity of our data allows us to provide evidence on the specificity of skill bundles for green occupations, differences in skill demand at the extensive and intensive margin, and complementarities between green skills and other skill types. More specifically green OJAs emphasize social, communication, and management skills. They also rely more on distinctive, specialized cognitive and manual skills.