The CCS team has put together an introductory guide to exploring the green career sector to help you navigate the emerging field. With green jobs growing at around four times the rate of the overall UK employment market (PwC, 2023), this guide contains a diverse set of resources that you can explore this summer to grow your familiarity and understanding of the enormous potential of the green job market.
All the resources below can found here on the CCS website.
JOB BOARDS
This list of job boards has been curated to help you navigate the sector in a number of ways. Whilst some organisations will advertise internship positions in these spaces, there is much more to be gained from these databases.
Firstly, job boards can be explored to create a stronger sense of the diversity of roles within the sector that might be relevant to your interests and skills. It will be useful to note what kinds of employers are hiring in your sub-sector, they might be private or public corporations, multi-national or small start-ups. You may start to recognise large industry names, or come across an unknown organisation that aligns with your aspirations. This can be a good place to start not only to increase familiarity with the sector, but from which to think about writing speculative applications. The university careers services provides a guide to writing CVS and other forms of applications here.
Each job board, listed below, will allow you to search within the broad definition of green careers, whether that be for a specific employer, job category, location, or field.
- Climate Jobs List
- Sustainability Professionals
- Climatebase
- Environmental Jobs
- Climate Careers Portal
- Climate Change Jobs
- Youth Climate Collaborative
- Green Jobs Board
OPPORTUNITIES IN CAMBRIDGE
A number of opportunities can also be found within Cambridge University.
For example, Cambridge Zero has collaborated this year with the Centre for Landscape Regeneration to run the Future Leaders Programme offering four paid summer internships. Similarly, the Centre for Climate Repair has offered four internships and five UROPs each year, beginning in 2021.
Opportunities are also often available within research groups at Cambridge. These can be harder to find as there is no central repository, however it is worth checking a research groups website page or enquiring with an academic from your department to find out if they have openings.
STAY INFORMED
It is important, though often challenging, to keep up to date with climate related news.
Luckily, there is a myriad of ways to stay informed within the fast-moving climate sector. This guide simply selects four resources that represent the diversity of these platforms.
- The 80,000 hours Podcast offers uniquely in-depth conversations with experts introducing global issues as well as providing short summaries of the discussions, highlights, references, and valuable links to further resources.
- Climate Now is a multimedia platform displaying videos, podcasts, and live events touching on the key scientific ideas, technologies and policies that underpin the global climate crisis. It’s conversations frequently go into a greater technical depth than the other resources listed here. It also provides a particularly helpful ‘related media’ section after each podcast linking to further episodes, articles and videos.
- Climate Hack offers a much briefer and easily digestible summary of climate news in a weekly email.
- The Polycrisis explores the intersectionality of the climate crisis expounding its’ complexity through a series of essays, panels, and podcasts.
For a more exhaustive list, you might refer to the resources page of Probable Futures which provides a broad list of organisations, media, both fiction and non-fiction, to inspire your journey through the climate crisis.
