Green Collar Jobs are Hot
Posted on February 11, 2008
Green collar jobs are all the rage. The Washington Post reports that they've been focused on by both Hillary Cliton and John Edwards in the presidential campaigns.
"We need to make sure that we start jump-starting the jobs in this country again," Clinton said during Monday's Democratic presidential debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C. "That's why I want to put money into clean-energy jobs, green-collar jobs."BusinessWeek also ran an article about professionals switching their talents to green-collar jobs. That article talks about a smart woman named Marie Kerpan who founded a company called Green Careers to help people find these types of careers.Later, when speaking of his plans of an economic stimulus during his presidency, Edwards said what he had "proposed for green-collar jobs will create jobs within 30 or so days, so we will have an immediate impact on the economy and stimulate the economy."
This wasn't the first time either Clinton or Edwards has touted such jobs. In various speeches on the campaign trail, Clinton has used green-collar to describe the employment that'll be created in the wake of job losses in manufacturing and other sectors. She can foresee a future where the manual labor of installing solar power panels or maintaining wind turbines becomes a mainstream occupation.
"These are jobs that can't be outsourced by and large," Clinton said last year on the Senate floor.
Not to be outdone, Edwards himself has been trying his best to to make green-collar part of the American labor-force lexicon. Last July, Clinton's fellow Democratic candidate for president announced his own plan to train 150,000 green-collar workers each year.
Weary of her own job as a career adviser at New York outplacement firm Drake Beam Morin (DKBMF), and anticipating the looming trend of green career-changers, Kerpan in 2000, positioned herself as an environmental career consultant-the first, she claims, of her kind.A promising study from the American Solar Energy Society that expects there to be 40 million green jobs by 2030.The other good thing about green jobs is that they might help reverse the global warming trend.Since then, her company, Green Careers, has helped thousands of people assess what cause their skills and interests are best suited to-which could be anything from renewable energy to water conservation-and has helped them get hired. Most of her clients come from middle management or higher, and are seeking what she calls a path-of-least-resistance move, "doing something you already know how to do and putting it in the context of the green agenda," she explains.