A visual story about career pathways in the green sector
Research Story
The usual transition story emphasizes short-run moves into similar green jobs. This project asks a longer career question: whether the green sector can also create upward mobility into managerial, science, and engineering occupations.
Question Mobility Wages Skills Policy
The project tracks workers after their first frontline fossil fuel job and follows whether later transitions open higher-mobility destinations.
Green-sector transitions are associated with higher probabilities of entering managerial and science and engineering occupations.
Upwardly mobile workers experience larger wage gains when moving into green-sector roles than when remaining in fossil fuel employment.
Occupation networks reveal possible sequences from frontline fossil fuel work into technical and managerial destinations.
Frontline fossil fuel workers face disruption as fossil fuel employment declines. The key question is whether green-sector transitions can support career advancement over time, not only horizontal moves into familiar trade occupations.
Workers who move into the green sector are more likely to reach managerial, science, and engineering roles than comparable workers who remain in fossil fuel employment. The point is not that every green job is high-wage immediately; it is that the sector offers more pathways into upwardly mobile roles.
The wage story changes when careers are studied over time. Green-sector transitions are associated with higher cumulative wages, partly because more workers reach higher-mobility occupations and because science and engineering roles in the green sector carry especially strong wage gains.
The paper maps how workers can move from frontline fossil fuel occupations toward engineering and managerial roles through stepping-stone occupations. Skill diversity is linked to managerial mobility, while deeper science and engineering skills are linked to technical mobility.
Training policy often focuses on the first move out of fossil fuel employment. This project suggests a broader target: reskilling systems that help workers build pathways into higher-mobility green-sector occupations over the course of a career.