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You are here: Home / Industry / Workforce Development – Green Job Promise

Workforce Development – Green Job Promise

March 30, 2010 By Brittany Quigley

 

Energy efficiency creates jobs. Studies in Oregon, Washington, and around the country have demonstrated that energy efficiency is the single largest contributor to the global green employment work space. While energy efficiency jobs don’t have the similarity or easy classification as other industry clusters (think bio-tech, healthcare, software, etc.), they do employ a range of professional and skilled labor positions in communities across the region. The industry itself (you know who you are) has a good sense of where the energy efficiency market potential is and the types of job skills companies need to serve that market. Unfortunately, there are more and more signs that enthusiasm is not listening to experience. Training dollars are flowing, curriculum and programs are in development, but insufficient attention is being paid to the need to create the work as the necessary first order requirement for creating the job. Newspapers and other media outlets are beginning to pick up on the seeming gap between the rhetoric and the results. It is critically important to start getting the sequence correct. Policy and program commitments must focus on helping stimulate efficiency projects across the built environment. In the short term, this likely means that all conservation savings aren’t created equal. The market needs commitments for deep and patient investments in improving the built environment. (Buying an energy efficient appliance is a wonderful thing, but it won’t create jobs in the short term.) Those are investments that will create professional and trades work – and give hope to those currently in workforce training for this new green economy that real employment is at hand. Without this change in focus, negative media attention on the “false promise” of energy efficiency job creation is almost certain to escalate.

Filed Under: Industry

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