New Careers in the Green Transition

This policy brief from CEDEFOP examines how the EU's green transition is reshaping labour demand and creating new occupations in clean technology. Using large-scale data from online job advertisements collected through the Web Intelligence Hub, it identifies emerging roles across engineering, installation, commissioning, maintenance, quality assurance and cybersecurity. The transition is creating growing demand for expertise in areas such as solar PV, heat pumps, renewable energy systems, smart grids and energy-efficient buildings, while also increasing the need for hybrid technical, digital and environmental skills.

However, the expansion of green employment is being held back by persistent skills shortages and wider structural barriers, including infrastructure constraints, complex regulation, supply-chain dependencies and uneven access to finance. The demand for green skills is reportedly growing more than twice as quickly as supply, with nearly one in five jobs requiring green skills potentially going unfilled by 2030 if current trends continue. The brief also stresses that the benefits of the transition will not be evenly distributed, as workers and regions dependent on carbon-intensive industries may face job displacement and require targeted support to move into emerging occupations.

The brief concludes that a just green transition requires coordinated investment in skills and workforce development. Key priorities include improving skills intelligence through online job-advertisement data, expanding and modernising vocational education and training, mapping transferable skills to enable career transitions, introducing flexible and stackable qualifications, supporting carbon-intensive regions, and strengthening digital and interdisciplinary capabilities. The overall message is that green investment alone is insufficient: education, training and labour-market policies must evolve alongside clean technologies so that workers can access new opportunities and the EU can overcome the skills shortages slowing the transition.