For the first time, 53% of global hires of professionals with green skills involve traditional roles, from finance to human resources; for these profiles, the hiring rate exceeds the average by 46.6%.
Green jobs: soft skills carry greater weight, being necessary in over 80% of positions and required at a high level in more than 40%.
The ESG Manager of the future will be less of a sustainability specialist and more of an interpreter of business transformation, capable of cross-functional dialogue across all departments: from the CFO to HR, production, supply chain, or technology leads.
2025–2029 Forecasts: overall demand could exceed 3.7 million workers, encompassing both new employment and the replacement of outgoing staff.
The sustainability profession is evolving: the ESG manager is emerging as a synthesis of skills and functions already present within companies, tasked with translating environmental, social, and governance goals into operational decisions. The ESG manager of the future will need to be less of a sustainability specialist and more of an interpreter of business transformation, capable of communicating with the CFO, HR managers, production, and the supply chain. Furthermore, this role is increasingly in demand yet in short supply: in 2025, Italian businesses planned nearly 2 million hires requiring specific ESG skills—representing one-third of total recruitments—and more than half reported difficulty finding the right candidates.
The LinkedIn Green Skills Report 2025 reveals the most sought-after profiles: for the first time, 53% of global hires of professionals with green skills involve traditional roles, ranging from finance to human resources, with the hiring rate for these profiles exceeding the average by 46.6%. Finally, soft skills carry greater weight, deemed necessary in 80% of these roles and required at a high level in 40% of them.
These are among the insights featured in the report “Green Jobs and the ESG Dimension: Where Is Job Creation Really Happening?”, edited by Alessandro Franceschini, Program Director of the Executive Master in Sustainability and Circular Economy at Rome Business School, and Valerio Mancini, Director of the Research Center at RBS. The study attempts to answer the question: “Where is job creation actually taking place through the ecological transition, and what conditions allow sustainability to be transformed into a concrete employment and economic opportunity?”
According to the authors, the ecological transition primarily transforms the content of existing roles within companies—from procurement to production, finance to human resources—and only partially generates entirely new professions. For example, a procurement manager who selects suppliers based on energy efficiency and traceability criteria contributes to the transition despite holding a position that no formal classification defines as “green.” “Sustainability is increasingly losing its character as a separate compliance domain to become a core component of industrial and competitive strategies,” notes Mancini.
Alongside adaptability, companies seeking candidates for green jobs prioritize teamwork skills (85.8%), autonomy (84%), and problem-solving abilities (83.5%). Overall, soft skills are necessary in over 80% of positions and at a high level in more than 40%.
This data illustrates how the professional figure in sustainability is shifting. The ESG Manager integrates competencies already present in the company, translating environmental, social, and governance goals into concrete actions and choices. The Sustainable Horizons 18 (2026) study, which surveyed 138 UK sustainability professionals, highlights that interpersonal, value-driven, and organizational skills are crucial for guiding companies through change, even though they remain undervalued compared to technical expertise. Such a broad skill set helps explain why sourcing these profiles is complicated: according to Unioncamere-MLPS Excelsior Information System (2025) data, companies report recruitment difficulties in 53.4% of cases, compared to 43.7% for other professions.
To understand where jobs are being created, the research distinguishes between three overlapping areas: professions directly engaged in producing environmental goods and services, traditional occupations requiring green skills, and corporate functions integrating environmental, social, and governance criteria. According to Unioncamere-Excelsior, energy-saving aptitude is required for 79.8% of planned openings—reflecting annual staffing requirements declared by businesses—highlighting how sought-after these skills are even outside strictly green professions.
What emerges is a two-speed demand. “On one hand, there is growing demand for specialists capable of overseeing complex technical areas; on the other hand, there is a rising need to spread baseline competencies among managers, technicians, and staff across production, logistics, administration, and procurement,” explains Franceschini. The root causes of the supply-demand mismatch include uneven regional distribution of skills, company struggles to define clear job profiles, rapid technological shifts, and the gap between training programs and production processes.
Green job demand must be analyzed by considering both market share and total volume. According to Unioncamere-Excelsior, ESG competencies are required in 69.8% of planned industry hires and 21% in services, peaking at 87.4% in construction and 73.9% in logistics. However, these percentages reflect hiring proportions within each individual sector, meaning a sector with a high percentage may still hire fewer total workers than a larger industry. In manufacturing, demand stems from environmental regulations and technical process transformations. In the service sector, sustainability is less visible and closely intertwined with digital technology—such as in logistics and energy monitoring—making the two transitions hard to separate.
On a regional level, online job postings requiring green skills—collected by Eurostat’s Web Intelligence Hub and processed by CRISP at the University of Milano-Bicocca—provide indirect evidence of growing demand: between 2019 and 2025, their share of total job ads in Italy rose from approximately 1.5% to 2.3%, with increases across all regions, led by Southern Italy and the Islands at around 4.8%.
Agriculture serves as one of the most practical examples, as the transition intersects with climate adaptation and water/soil management. Eurostat (2026) estimates full-time equivalents in the environmental economy across agriculture, forestry, and fishing at approximately 0.7 million, growing at an average rate of 5% per year since 2014. Emerging profiles include digital agronomists, irrigation technicians, and supply chain specialists; however, many roles can be created simply by upskilling existing staff, while smaller companies may access these capabilities through cooperatives, contractors, and consultants.
The issue is particularly acute for SMEs, which have tighter margins for investing in specialized staff. According to the European Commission’s Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2025 report, 78% of European SMEs report labor and skills shortages, and hiring a full-time specialist can prove cost-prohibitive. Consequently, the authors highlight shared services, specialized consulting, and internal staff training as more sustainable paths forward.
A coordinated response is required across businesses, technical institutes, universities, training providers, and employment services. Programs must combine specialization with soft skills and align directly with technologies actively adopted by companies, avoiding generic coursework. “It is essential to distinguish initial training, which prepares individuals for labor market entry, from reskilling, which accompanies changing job responsibilities and reduces the risk of skills mismatches in a rapidly evolving market,” states Franceschini.
For businesses, the first step is mapping the value chain to pinpoint where energy consumption, emissions, and waste concentrate, determining whether internal staffing, training, or external expertise is needed. Measurement also remains a critical challenge. Caution is required regarding the financial ROI of sustainability investments, as it varies by sector, energy and raw material pricing, company size, and available incentives, requiring case-by-case evaluation. The same applies to labor: raw recruitment numbers reveal little about wages, job stability, or safety. Reliable, comparable historical data, detailed regional and sectoral insights, and post-investment evaluations are therefore essential.
Unioncamere-Excelsior forecasts for the 2025–2029 five-year period indicate an overall labor demand that, under an optimistic scenario, could exceed 3.7 million workers—encompassing both new job creation and replacement hires. The key challenge will be ensuring this demand translates into real employment rather than positions that businesses continually struggle to fill.