Green Collar Jobs Topic of Earth Day
Green Collar Jobs
When looking ahead at jobs that will be around in the future, a career in fields pursuing Green Jobs is a good place to look. The jobs are often grouped together as Green Collar Jobs.*
Green jobs are engaged in activities and businesses that protect, or improve environmental impacts. Some of the jobs are physical jobs working with the earth in agriculture, forestry, or fishing. On another end of the spectrum Green Jobs may be involved in otherwise, non-green industries like financial investing, but these investors focus on investing in companies that are doing green business.
Renewable energy, such as solar, wind and geothermal are all green industries. Architects and builders that are making the effort to make buildings highly energy efficient to run and less wasteful, more earth friendly to build, are included in the Green category.
As people, businesses and governments are becoming more aware of the need for sustainable and less environmentally brutal practices, the job market in green industries is growing. Many businesses have green jobs within their company, even if they are unrelated to environmental industries. These jobs are often focused on helping companies improve their practices that could impact the environment, such as in manufacturing, managing their shipping or lessoning their energy consumption.
In the first three months of 2015 1.2 million green jobs were posted as newly open positions. California, Texas and New York were the leading states for this hiring category. The growth in the manufacturing of electric cars and solar power get a lot of the attention in the news for green jobs, they are certainly growing bright spots.
National Geographic provides a look at the 11 Fastest Growing Green Jobs
In 2015 The US Department of Labor Blog provided stats about green jobs
https://blog.dol.gov/2015/04/22/earth-day-top-green-jobs-in-2015/
This is a playbook for students and fresh graduates on how to land a job in Clean Energy. It includes profiles of people in the industry and much more
http://www.e2.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/E2-Clean-Power-Players_FINAL_Pages.pdf
The Green Jobs Network lists jobs now available and is a good way to research potential jobs you could aspire to after school. They are listed by category, and by city
The Green collar Blog continually highlights career advice and opportunities to learn more about careers which are green
http://www.greencollarblog.org/
This list of jobs from a March 2016 job fair targeted towards the Ivy League schools gives a powerful example of the jobs and organizations posted on a pretty high scale reach for candidates
http://allivyfair.ei.columbia.edu/recruiters/category/2016/
*Footnote: That is a spin on the white collar job tag used to describe jobs that are often at a desk or in an office. Many, but not all of these jobs require a college degree. The Blue Collar Jobs description is for jobs typically associated with physical action in the job. These skilled jobs are a mix of jobs that get on-the job training or technical training.