The topic of green jobs has become a hot-button issue in education and economic/workforce development circles. To respond, we have published a few practical guides to green jobs. A common thread in all of them is stressing the need for data-driven strategies on the local and regional level.
White Papers
Part 1: A Look at Green Occupations
In this first installment, we took a look at some of the implications of policy to create green jobs. The goal is to help local practitioners know and understand this issue so they can develop intelligent, data-driven local responses.
Part 2: Which (Green) Project Is Best For Your Region?
Next, we brought this need to address layoffs into the green job equation and learned how to assess regional development projects (including "green" ones) on the basis of multiplier effects, long-term vs. short-term effects, cost per job created/saved, and fiscal impacts.
Part 3: Green Pathways
At the local level, the discussion of green jobs should be rooted in data as much as possible. As regions consider major investments in the green economy and workforce and education professionals counsel jobseekers on new opportunities in “green occupations,” it is essential that a data-driven approach is applied to avoid purely anecdotal decisions that could ultimately waste people’s time and money. To this end, in this piece we aim to help local planners understand how to analyze green jobs or the potential for green jobs in their own communities.
Part 4: Which Infrastructure Project Will Have the Best Impact
We turn our attention to understanding infrastructure projects, and how we can evaluate them based on regional cost/benefit analysis. In this discussion we will be reviewing and applying the concepts of input-output, economic impact, and fiscal impact.
Part 5: How To Prepare Jobseekers for the Green Economy
This paper is meant as a practical guide to help workforce, education, economic development professionals (and any other sort of career counselor) understand green jobs and be able to offer solid advice to young people and jobseekers so they can get on the right track and in the context of the demands of the regional economy.
Op-Eds, Case Studies, etc.
Green Policy and Regional Development
EMSI marketing director Rob Sentz takes a look at some of the frustrations regional developers have with green policies in this op-ed piece.
Case Study: California Centers of Excellence use data-driven approach to identify, assess green jobs
With California community colleges seeking to understand how the growth of green jobs will affect workforce education and training, the state’s 10 Centers of Excellence came together to discuss how best to approach the issue. One of the outcomes for Michelle Marquez, director of the Central Valley Region Center of Excellence, was to dive into a study to identify emerging green industries in the Central Valley.
Analysis of Green O*NET-SOC Clusters
A neat report put out by the O*NET Resource Center, called “Greening the World of Work,” used O*NET codes to establish a starting point for understanding green jobs. In order to run labor market analysis, link to staffing industries, and establish trends over time, we have translated the coding over to the Standard Occupational Classification system, or SOC codes.
