Exploring skills in the green transition: new insights from Italian data world
17.02.2025
Irene Brunetti (Istituto nazionale per l’analisi delle politiche pubbliche – INAPP), Federico Fabio Frattini (Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei), Martino Kuntze (Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza – Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei), Andrea Ricci (Istituto nazionale per l’analisi delle politiche pubbliche – INAPP), Francesco Vona (Università degli Studi di Milano, Dipartimento di Scienze e Politiche Ambientali – Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei)
J24, J6, F64
green skills, brown skills, skill distance, job-to-job transitions, green jobs
INAPP
INAPP WP n. 134
This paper investigates job transitions and skill alignment in Italy’s green transition, using multiple datasets to analyse the role of skills in shaping occupational mobility. Building on previous studies, we identify 28 General Green Skills (GGS), primarily encompassing analytical, technical, and monitoring competencies, which overlap significantly with General Brown Skills (GBS), as 13 out of 18 GBS also appear among the GGS. Further, this paper offers a methodological overview of the construction of skill distance metrics, evaluating various alternatives. Selecting as a preferred alternative a skill distance metric derived from factor analysis and Manhattan distance, we find that it negatively correlates with occupational mobility. Preliminary correlations show that moving toward green occupations alleviates this negative correlation, while moving away from brown occupations does not interplay with skill distance.