How becoming green is creating job opportunities

For many larger companies reducing their carbon footprint, becoming carbon neutral, and improving their overall sustainability are key tenets of how they operate.

Recent years have seen businesses investing in things like greener energy solutions and energy saving equipment, along with creating jobs dedicated to making these businesses as sustainable as possible.

And it’s not just these businesses that have created job opportunities either. Green industries such as renewable energy and energy efficient tech manufacturers have continued to grow, and with this growth comes more jobs available all thanks to sustainability.

Investigating the ONS data on green jobs, cloud provider and renewable energy users Fasthosts found that from 2015-2022 the amount of jobs in green industries had increased by 24.1%, with an 8.4% increase from 2021-2022 alone.

Of the larger industries listed, ‘renewable energy’ saw the largest percentage increase in jobs, with an astonishing rise of 70.1% accounting for nearly 20,000 roles. Meanwhile ‘waste’ was the industry with the largest actual rise in the number of jobs with 37,900, no doubt thanks to continuous pushes in recycling and other similar areas.

The other increases seen include a rise of 23.9% in ‘environmental charities’, 52.9% in ‘water quantity’, and 10.61% in ‘repairs’, showing the sweeping growths across the board for green areas.

Everything suggests that these increases are only set to continue, though maybe more gradually than the ones seen in this dataset. 2020-2022 saw a huge boom in green industries with rises for smaller industries such as environmental consultancy, energy storage, and energy saving leading the way.

Reduced energy consumption during the pandemic left renewable power in a very good place, as sources like wind and solar continued to produce unneeded power that needed to be safely stored for later down the line, showing the merits of renewable energy and attracting interest in the industry.

It’s not just the expansions of green industries that have led to more roles related to sustainability either. Many businesses now employ sustainability officers and managers to help keep them on track with their sustainability goals, leading to a whole new profession and section of the job market.

There’s 2,273 of these kinds of roles available on Indeed at the time of writing, with a further 2,292 on Reed and 1,196 listed on LinkedIn across the UK. The availability of these roles coincides with a rise in interest too, with Google searches for ‘sustainability jobs’ experiencing an increase of 58.7% over the past 5 years, according to keyword research tool Ahrefs.