The Devil in the Detail
O*NET is making itself known as a prime candidate for the UK's green skills taxonomy. But hey folks, don't go crazy...
O*NET prioritises analysis of broad skills, with attributes summarised in a smaller number of measures than in other taxonomies. These can be further grouped using higher-level groupings contained within the taxonomy or other divisions such as ‘data-people-things’. The SPB’s work to date has focused on skills at this broad level and our view is that O*NET is suitable for this purpose and remains the most appropriate taxonomy to use.
Skills and Productivity Board: Review of skills taxonomies, May 2022.
Having largely ignored the US Occupational Information Network (O*NET) for years, the UK Government now seems to be discovering this hitherto hidden corner of the special relationship and is showing signs of taking to O*NET like a new religion. Not only does O*NET underpin the long-awaited output from the now-disbanded Skills and Productivity Board (SPB), but we also find a steer to the new Unit for Future Skills (UFS) from the SPB in its methodology document:
…developing a UK specific skills taxonomy would require significant time and resource and the Board considers it appropriate to first test the suitability of O*NET (and other available taxonomies) for the UK before considering developing a UK-specific equivalent.
Skills and Productivity Board: Opportunities and challenges for improving labour market information on skills, Feb 2022.
We shall see whether the UFS takes up this recommendation, although we do note that one of its priorities for 2022 is ‘conducting research projects on future skills demand forecasting and a UK specific skills taxonomy’. One to watch, we feel.
Not to be outdone (perhaps), the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is also dabbling into O*NET, and in no less an area than The Green Edge’s backyard, green skills. We were therefore intrigued and, it has to be said, a little alarmed to find that ONS has been using O*NET to carry out research into time spent doing green tasks in the UK between 1997 and 2019.
Why were we alarmed? Well, for starters it seems a bit of stretch to take data from O*NET - with all the data cross-walking that we know is needed to get it to apply in a UK context - and then try to use it for something that O*NET itself doesn’t even attempt to do1. And secondly, do we really need to know that England tends to have slightly higher levels of time spent on green tasks (calculated at a very concise 7.3% in 2019) than, say, Scotland (at 7.0% in the same year)?
Let’s examine in a little more detail what ONS seems to have done here. It’s used a set of ‘green’ tasks that O*NET included in its releases between 2011 and 2019 and then mapped them across from the O*NET occupations (of which there are around a thousand) to the UK occupations (of which there were only around 370 at the most granular level, assuming ONS used the SOC 2010 release in its analysis). In fairness, ONS has most likely done a lot of aggregation and approximation in the process, but then to come up with time estimates to a fraction of a percentage point and then infer that English workers do more green work than Scottish ones does seem to playing a little fast and loose with the data.
Netting green skills
The O*NET green task dataset has not been included in O*NET releases (of which there are typically one major and two or three minor ones each year) since 2019. Which is a pity, because O*NET also made a major new release of its occupational classification in 2020 and introduced important new occupations like Blockchain Engineers, Data Scientists, GIS Technicians and Nanotechnologists. Green profiles on some emerging occupations like these would have been nice.
That said and with all the data caveats in place, we’ve always found the qualitative data in O*NET to be pretty useful. And, looking specifically at the green task data (when it was included) we feel it does shed some light on the question that many learned bodies – ONS included – tend to tie themselves in knots over: the question of what is a ‘green job’?.
We’ve talked before in our posts about the conflation that we think exists in the minds of policy makers, between green skills and green jobs. Surely it’s not too much of an oversimplification to say that every job is a green job if those tasks that affect the triple bottom line are done in a green way? But, of course, it takes the appropriate knowledge and skill to be embedded in every worker to make that happen.
To illustrate our point about the conflation, O*NET has a very useful entity called a Work Activity. Work Activities are aggregations of individual tasks and, in O*NET, they exist at three levels of aggregation – Detailed (DWA), Intermediate (IWA) and General (GWA). We know of several projects in the US that roughly equate either DWAs or IWAs to competences. O*NET’s broad equivalent in Europe - ESCO - defines a competence as ‘the proven ability to use knowledge, skills and personal, social and/or methodological abilities, in work or study situations and in professional and personal development’.
Here’s a graphic we made using O*NET green work activities for an indisputably ‘green’ occupation:
Can we see how the DWA’s in the outer ring might correspond to teachable competences, while the GWA’s in the inner ring are more broadly aligned to transverse skills? Perhaps. Here’s another one, this time for an occupation that is growing in importance in the green economy:
And finally, for an occupation which may in some minds not be classed as a ‘green’ job but has a significant ‘green’ impact:
Admittedly, the green work activities do tend to thin out as we get away from the more conventional ‘green’ jobs, but that’s what we would expect - the green tasks become just part of the job. But that doesn’t invalidate them, it simply highlights those parts of a job that can be done in a green way, or can be added as part of green job expansion.
Building on O*NET for skilling up the the UK green economy
Whether or not O*NET becomes the foundation for a UK green skills taxonomy, we believe it would be useful to adopt the data collection tools that O*NET has been refining for years. Perhaps this could be linked initially to the upcoming Employer Skills Survey of 86,000 workplaces, and also to the job ad-scraping approach used by the likes of EMSI and Burning Glass.
No matter which approach is adopted, we believe the UK desperately needs a source of standardised and regularly collected occupational data to inform the transition to a zero carbon future.
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To be fair, ONS does caveat this work with the statement that its estimates should be treated with caution.