Got green skills? Soon they’ll bear fruit, a LinkedIn report has found

Being green at work doesn’t mean what it once did, and green skills are now a requirement in one in four new job postings on LinkedIn.

About one in eight Australian workers are considered green in their roles, but the term – once used to describe a novice – now means something entirely different.

Green skills, which about 25 per cent of job postings on LinkedIn now require, refer to the skills necessary to help companies achieve their sustainability goals.

The most in-demand green skills in the country, according to LinkedIn, are sustainability reporting, sustainability consulting, soil sampling, environmental consulting, environmental planning and corporate social responsibility.

Those were the insights from the social media and jobs platform’s latest report on the green economy, which LinkedIn says has grown 26 per cent year on year.

The findings arrive as the Australian Securities and Investments Commission has begun to crackdown on the practice of greenwashing – when a company exaggerates or provides misleading claims about its environmental impact.

Publicly disclosing sustainability plans has become increasingly important for companies, and for investors, and some companies have been found by the corporate watchdog to oversell and underdeliver.

When it comes to employees, LinkedIn’s senior director of talent solutions, Adam Gregory, said he believed those with green skills would soon reap a dividend in their career.

While there wasn’t yet data to suggest it, he believed learning green skills would open pathways and possibly lead to other benefits, including a lift in pay.

On rival jobs platform Seek, sustainability jobs varied in wages quite substantially.

One opening at Indigeco Pty Ltd for a waste and sustainability officer paid $362.50 per day plus super, while Ampersand International was offering $620 per day to a senior sustainability officer to manage a team that dealt in Green Star certification of school infrastructure.

Taronga Park Zoo was offering between $129,391 to $142,585 to an environmental sustainability manager.

The industries with a lower number of green skills included financial services, technology and information, and media. Consumer services had the lowest demand for green skills and lagged behind other countries, LinkedIn found.

The sectors which had undergone a “significant green transformation” included farming, ranching and forestry. Meanwhile the construction, oil, gas and mining and utility sectors were in “advanced stages” of their green transformation.

The skills required to do the same role had changed as much as 27 per cent between 2015 and 2022, according to LinkedIn. By 2025, the difference will have grown to 43 to 45 per cent, with green skills potentially forming part of the difference.

“I think it’s really fundamental for people to think about where green skills play a role in their job as their career evolves,” Mr Gregory said.