LinkedIn: Green Skills Hand UK Workers a 38% Hiring Edge

Green skills have gone mainstream, and the numbers finally back the hype. A LinkedIn report published today finds that UK workers with green skills are hired at a rate 38.1% higher than the overall economy.

The "Powering Opportunity Across the UK" report draws on data from LinkedIn's 40 million UK members. Its central finding is that green skills are no longer the preserve of engineers and energy specialists. More than half the people who hold them, 53.1%, do not work in a job with a green title at all.

Caoimhe Keogan, Chief People Officer at software firm AVEVA, says that shift is rewriting how companies hire.

"Green skills are not limited to a handful of technical roles. At AVEVA, they show up in how every team helps our customers use the world's resources more responsibly."

Green skills are spreading across every team

The report frames sustainability as a thread now running through finance, procurement, professional services and software rather than a silo. As climate and energy priorities embed across the economy, the skills that serve them follow.

That tracks a deeper churn in work itself. LinkedIn estimates 38% of the skills a job requires changed between 2016 and 2023, and that figure could reach 70% by 2030.

The green economy is growing fast alongside it. Full-time jobs in green industries rose 27.8% between 2015 and 2024, from around 500,000 to more than 650,000. 

Lisa Wee, AVEVA's Chief Sustainability Officer, says "AI and data are critical enablers of the energy transition, but it's people who turn insight into impact."

A hiring premium, and a widening gap

Demand is the easy part. The harder truth in the report is that supply is not keeping up.

Green hiring in the UK is growing at 7.78% a year, nearly twice as fast as the rate at which workers are actually acquiring green skills, at 4.19%. In 2025, only 18.4% of UK professionals added a green skill, behind Germany's 21.1%.

Helen Bradbury, Chief People Officer at E.ON, sees the squeeze first-hand at a utility racing to fit heat pumps, solar and battery systems. "Green skills are no longer a future aspiration; they're a fundamental requirement for our industry today," Helen says.

The work itself is moving too. Over the past decade UK solar jobs have surged 76% and wind 42%, while oil and gas employment has fallen 29%, redrawing where opportunity sits.

Some 36% of UK workers want a role that contributes to climate adaptation, rising to 49% of Gen Z and 55% of Millennials, a motivation HR can turn into recruitment and retention.

The gap HR cannot ignore

The report also exposes who is missing out. Men hold 79.5% of the UK's green skills against 20.5% for women, and on the current trajectory it would take 30 years merely to halve that divide.

LinkedIn argues the fix is structural. Skills-based hiring, it says, could lift women's share of qualified talent pools by more than 25%, by valuing capability over credentials and titles.

Shortages that could stall projects in 2030 need fixing now, making green skills less a corporate-responsibility line item than a live workforce-planning problem for every CHRO.