Fifty Shades of Green
The Green Skills Map is bold, broad, and unfinished. That’s why it’s our Top Read for May.
There’s something irresistible about a big, ambitious framework. The Green Skills Map from greenskills.org wants to be the definitive taxonomy of skills for the green economy—and it nearly gets there. It’s an open-source master list of what tomorrow’s workforce might need.
It’s not perfect. But it’s definitely our Top Read this month—because it goes further than most in showing what a net-zero workforce could look like. And crucially, it invites all of us to help shape it.
At its best, the Green Skills Map is a marvel of integration. It systematically categorises over 240 skill clusters across 11 domains—from renewable energy and the built environment to the circular economy and nature-based solutions. It’s not just a list. It’s a vision of a net-zero workforce, and a serious attempt to support governments, educators, and businesses in planning for it. In an ecosystem where too many skills reports read like wishlists, this one shows its workings.
Its utility as a workforce planning tool is also a highlight. By offering a structure that links current roles with future needs, the Map helps to identify where we need to upskill and reskill. It creates alignment between training providers and employers, and that’s a good place to start if we’re ever going to close the green skills gap. It also scores points for being open-source and evolving—an invitation to refine as we go, which is the only kind of map worth having when the territory keeps shifting.
That said, the Green Skills Map isn’t above critique. For all its breadth, the current version leaves some key things underexplored. For instance, soft skills—the real glue of green transitions—get only cursory attention. Communication for sustainability, leadership, systems thinking, public engagement—these are not nice-to haves, they’re essential. If we can’t explain the green transition, we can’t deliver it.
Then there’s the lack of regional or national contextualisation. The framework aims to be globally relevant, but in doing so risks losing the messy, situated realities of labour markets. What’s green in Ghana is not what’s green in Glasgow. Without mechanisms for localisation, we risk developing training plans that speak to everywhere and nowhere at once.
The digital dimension also feels a touch undercooked. Yes, there are nods to smart cities and precision agriculture, but this is 2025. Where’s the discussion of AI for biodiversity, blockchain in supply chain transparency, or digital twins in energy optimisation? If we want to build for the future, we need to map the skills that will shape it.
Also conspicuously absent are cross-sectoral roles—the implementers, project managers, systems connectors, and policy navigators who do the unseen but critical work of making it all hang together. And finally, there's no differentiation of skill levels. A junior energy technician and a senior net-zero strategist appear on the same plane. That’s a problem for educators trying to design progressive curricula or for learners trying to plan career pathways.
What’s curious—and promising—is that we’ve seen this kind of effort before. We’ve written previously about SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age), for instance, which has long provided a structured way to categorise digital competencies, complete with levels of responsibility and role-based views. It doesn’t try to be all things to all people. It sets out a clean architecture and lets stakeholders build with it.
The Green Skills Map could take a leaf from SFIA’s book. Adding competency tiers—foundational to advanced—would make it more actionable for course designers and HR professionals alike. And adopting view-based interfaces, so different users (policy-makers, educators, employers) can slice the map differently, would multiply its relevance.
But we also want to make a case for sector-specific frameworks, which sit alongside and complement a map of this kind. Take, for example, the Global Responsibility Competency Compass from Engineers Without Borders. It’s beautifully focused, values-driven, and ready to use. Sometimes, you need to zoom in before you can build out. A universal map is great. But sometimes, a compass is better.
We’d like to see the next iteration of the Green Skills Map lean into a few directions:
Add Proficiency Levels: Basic, intermediate, and advanced competencies would help clarify both progression routes and training needs.
Expand the Digital-Environmental Nexus: Include more green-aligned digital skills—data science, sensor networks, remote sensing, and open-source modelling.
Integrate Soft Skills: Make space for collaboration, strategic thinking, and interdisciplinary fluency—not as an afterthought, but as core competencies.
Provide Regional Adaptation Tools: Let local planners plug in their own labour data and resource priorities.
Link to Real Job Roles and Learning Pathways: Bring it alive through scenario-based storytelling, not just lists and grids.
This isn’t the only framework out there. It’s part of a growing ecosystem of skills taxonomies and just transition toolkits, from the green adjuncts to ESCO and O*NET to ILO’s Green Jobs Initiative and the European sustainability competence framework GreenComp. Each adds something, but none do it all. The Green Skills Map is trying to get closer to that sweet spot—a meta-framework that can dialogue with others while providing real-world traction.
We’d also love to see a live data interface, pulling demand signals from platforms like LinkedIn, Coursera, and national labour observatories. Let the taxonomy meet the tempo of the real world. Let it be not just a map, but a mirror
.There’s an irony here, of course. As we try to classify the unclassifiable—the multi-sector, multi-scale, multi-stakeholder mess that is the green economy—we also run the risk of over-codifying something that thrives on creativity and care. That’s why our praise for the Green Skills Map comes with a plea: Don’t let the grid suppress the garden. Use the map. But leave space for paths we haven’t walked yet.
We made the Green Skills Map our Top Read this month not because it’s finished, but because it’s ready to be shaped. It opens doors, frames questions, and dares to sketch what a green-skilled future might look like. That’s worth celebrating.
But like all maps, it’s only useful if we know where we’re going—and who we’re taking with us.