Who is Transitioning to Green? Introducing a Text-Based Indicator to Measure Skill Transferability for the Green Transition

Research on the economic and political implications of a green transition so far focused on the prevalence of green jobs and brown jobs, while skill transferability, understood as the compatibility of existing jobs with green jobs, has been largely overlooked. Therefore, I propose a text-based indicator to assess an occupation’s degree of skill transferability for the green transition by measuring cosine similarities between sentence embeddings of green tasks and non-green tasks associated with standard occupations. This approach results in similar assessments for SOC-task descriptions for the US and ISCO-08 task descriptions for Eu-rope, paving the way for comparative research. Applying this indicator to the European con-text using the European Social Survey reveals that skill transferability can be high in previously underestimated labor market segments. This has implications for the effective design of green labor market policies and for assessments of vulnerabilities stemming from economic transformations related to climate policy.