From coal face to the green race

Research in the World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development has looked at changes in the labour market in regions of Greece affected by the rapid phasing-out of coal and the move to renewables. The research suggests that current European Union approaches to green skills risks underestimating how unevenly job skills are spread across different sectors undergoing this energy transition.

The research was done in the context of the European Green Deal and its Just Transition Mechanism. These both aim to support workers and regions shifting away from fossil fuels. The research used survey data from more than 500 companies across three sectors, energy, construction, and ICT, to build a skills gap index. This statistical measure comparing existing workforce capabilities with those required by employers could help avoid many of the emerging problems of the energy transition.

The work shows that there is a big divergence between sectors. The energy sector, undergoing the most direct structural change away from fossil fuels, has the largest and most complex skills gaps. Specifically, employers report shortages in the necessary financial expertise needed to structure investments in emerging technologies such as hydrogen systems, alongside technical and strategic capabilities for managing evolving energy networks. In construction, there is a narrower but still important gap that is concentrated in green building practices. In ICT, there are also smaller skills gaps overall, but this might simply be a reflection of limited awareness of the problem among those surveyed.

A central finding of the work is that almost all skills identified (over 91 per cent) are not easily transferable between the three sectors being considered. This, the researchers say, challenges the big assumption that green skills can be treated as a single, unified labour category suitable for broad training programmes. There is much to be done at the energy coalface, as it were, in terms of awareness and training to ease the transition to a low-carbon future despite grand political statements and policies.

Galanos, G., Agiropoulos, C., Kyrlis, I. and Zlatini, K. (2026) ‘From coal to green: skills pathways for key emerging sectors in just transition regions’, World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp.1–37.