Who is transitioning to green? Introducing a text-based indicator to measure green skill transferability

Managing a green transition to a sustainable economic system will fundamentally affect the organization of labor markets. To ensure that this green transition is also a just transition it is essential to better understand which employees are vulnerable to these labor market disruptions due to an outdated or inflexible skill set. In other words, knowing what it takes for workers to transition from brown to green requires insights on which of their skills can make this transition with them. To address this gap, I propose a text-based indicator to measure any worker's degree of skill transferability for the green transition based on occupational skills and tasks. This indicator utilizes cosine similarities between sentence embeddings of green tasks and non-green tasks required in specific occupations. It performs equally well across fine-grained levels of occupational classifications, thus paving the way for cross-sectional comparisons. Moreover, the indicator serves as a complement to existing measures of greenness of labor markets as it allows for a more fine-grained analysis of the potential transferability of skills in the green transition. The developed method can augment future research on labor market mobility in light of economic transformations by directly assessing the transition potential of specific skills. Thereby, it can assist policymakers in the design of tailored up- and re-skilling programs to ensure that labor market participants meet the skill requirements for a transition to sustainable and decent jobs. • Green skill transferability indicator applicable across occupational classifications. • Application of the Sentence BERT to create vectorized representations of tasks. • Text-based comparison of tasks between green and non-green occupations. • Combination of US and European skill assessments. • Low skill transferability in high emission sectors key challenge for policy makers.