LinkedIn’s global policy lead Sue Duke on why demand for green skills is outpacing supply, and why workforce readiness belongs in the Global Stocktake at COP31.
LinkedIn is taking its Global Green Skills Report 2026 to the COP31 presidency with a clear ask: that workforce readiness be measured as a key enabler in the next Global Stocktake.
The Global Stocktake is the UN process, set out in the Paris Agreement, in which countries and other stakeholders assess collective progress towards the agreement’s goals every five years. The second one begins at COP31 in Turkey this week and concludes in 2028.
The LinkedIn report, published on 22 October, found that the share of green hiring grew by 25pc year on year, twice the 13pc growth in the share of workers gaining green skills. Workers with green skills were hired at more than 1.5 times the rate of the wider workforce, despite a difficult jobs market, and LinkedIn said demand outpaced supply in every industry it measured.
Sue Duke, LinkedIn’s managing director for EMEA and global vice-president of public policy, told Siliconrepublic.com the numbers amounted to a call to action for policymakers.
Demand in a sluggish market
“What comes through very consistently and very clearly in the report is that the demand for green skills and green workers continues to boom,” Duke said. “And that – let’s not forget – is against a backdrop of quite a sluggish hiring labour market generally. Hiring typically across most of our markets studied in this report is down somewhere between 10 and 15pc.”
“We’ve seen fully a 25pc uplift over the course of the past year on the hiring of workers with these green skills. So that gives you a real sense of just the strength of the demand that for these green skills.”
The problem, Duke said, was that workers were not acquiring green skills quickly enough to match, with demand growing at twice the rate of supply. This is why LinkedIn wants policymakers at COP to include worker transition and green skills in the Stocktake – “so that we can ensure organisations and economies have access to these skills and workers, but also that workers themselves can take advantage of the opportunities that the energy transition presents.”
Appetite without a pathway
Duke said the research showed no shortage of interest from younger workers. “We don’t have a problem with appetite, particularly when it comes to that younger generation,” she said. “They are hungry to get jobs and to work in this area, but the challenge they face is that they just don’t know where to start.”
“Six in every 10 of Gen Z workers told us that they were keen to move into a role that included climate as part of the remit over the course of the next year,” said Duke. “And three in every 10 of them told us that they’d be willing to quit their existing job to try and go out and find a job that has a climate element to it.”
The report found that 57pc of Gen Z workers surveyed would ideally like a job that contributes to tackling climate change or the energy transition, compared with 50pc of millennials and 43pc of workers overall. Yet 54pc of Gen Z said they found it difficult to find a green job, against 26pc of millennials. The proportion of younger workers with green skills has grown by an average of 17pc a year since 2021, nearly twice the rate among millennials (9pc).
Employers have a part to play, she said. “One of the areas where we need to focus is on ensuring that employers are providing these skills to workers, because only 15pc of workers that we surveyed told us that these kinds of training programmes are available within their existing employer.”
Resilience is key
The report found that 74pc of green hires, nearly three in four, are now going into jobs without traditionally green titles. Duke said that showed how far these skills had moved into the mainstream.
“So we see software engineers with green skills going into code more efficiently. We see workers in the insurance industry going in to do climate audits. We see a huge surge in the demand for construction workers with these green skills.”
She said the fastest-growing green skill in demand was operational efficiency. “All businesses are seeking to be more competitive, more efficient, more resilient,” she said.
“And so what they’re doing is going out and hiring these workers with these green skills, with skills such as operational efficiency – which reduces your waste, maximises your resource use – and putting them into not green roles per se, but into core roles within the business.”
“And we expect that that dynamic will only continue to grow as the importance of these roles and these skills, which bring together both climate action but also business priorities, are going to continue to merge.”
“We’re seeing that green skill growth in demand in a whole range of jobs, from software engineer to data analyst to accountant to finance professionals, and in sectors right the way through from construction to retail. So it really gives you a sense of the breadth of these roles, of these jobs, of these skills, and how central they’re becoming to the operation of businesses and not just focused on climate action.”
AI is unsurprisingly part of the picture. LinkedIn found that the proportion of data centre workers with at least one green skill had more than tripled in five years, from 4pc in 2021 to 14pc in 2026, while green workers with AI skills grew by 54pc.
For Duke, the conclusion was that these were no longer specialist skills. “They are now core economic infrastructure, and we need to ensure that we’re putting training programmes in place at scale and at speed so that we can bridge what is becoming a quite sizeable skills gap now,” she said.
“What that tells us is that it’s the responsibility of both the private and public sector to come together to recognise that these skills are no longer just niche green skills for the green sector. They are now core economic infrastructure, and we need to ensure that we’re putting training programmes in place at scale and at speed so that we can bridge what is becoming a quite sizeable skills gap now.”
Duke singled out construction as an example. “So fully one in every eight construction roles is looking for green skills, but only one in 20 construction workers have these skills. And buildings, as we know represent 40pc of emissions. That’s an area we have got to get right if we’re going to get to where we need to get to. It means we have to start investing in workers, including construction workers, so that they can acquire these skills, get these jobs and start powering the transition.”
The report also pointed to uneven access. Women account for just three in 10 workers with green skills globally, and LinkedIn estimates that at the current rate of progress it will take more than 30 years to close the gender gap.
LinkedIn’s ask at COP31
LinkedIn now wants workforce readiness included in the second Global Stocktake, due to conclude at COP33 in 2028. On access, it said employers focusing on what people can do rather than their qualifications or previous job titles could expand the available green talent pool by 3.5 times.
“And what we’re asking for at COP is that workers and talent and skills are a part of the global stocktake. It’s the second global stocktake, as you know, happening in Turkey over the next two weeks. What we need to see is that these workers are put right at the heart of that stocktake, and that we start to measure and monitor and invest in the green skills that are absolutely fundamental to this transition happening.”
Just today here in Ireland, UCC in Cork has launched its Sustainability Academy, a dedicated programme focused on sustainability education and training. The course is designed to address the urgent green skills shortages across Ireland’s workforce and to support the green transition.
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