When it comes to living green, the Twin Cities metro area has been ahead of the curve for quite a while. We were at the top of Bicycling magazine's latest "America's Top 50 Bike-Friendly Cities" list, edging out Portland, and we scored a respectable 11 and 12 (for Minneapolis and St. Paul, respectively) on Popular Science's "America's 50 Greenest Cities" list.

But it's harder to tell whether our job market is going green. The study of the green economy is new, and so the picture is still incomplete. For starters, what makes a job green? With some jobs, of course, it's pretty straightforward. Working for a nonprofit that encourages people to weatherize their houses to save energy is unassailably green, and so is designing energy-efficient buildings or wiring wind turbines. But what about an accountant at a sustainable design firm? Or a truck driver who transports wind turbine equipment? Do they make the green cut?

The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development has been investigating the scale of Minnesota's green labor market. Using a $1.5 million grant from the federal Department of Labor to study how many jobs the green economy is creating, DEED is conducting a series of surveys to find out how many vacancies employers have, and how many of those vacancies fit the definition of green.

It's Not Easy Defining Green

"Compared to other states, we're light years ahead in researching what's going on in green employment," says Kyle Uphoff, assistant director of labor market information for DEED. "But even at the cutting edge, there really isn't much information."

That's due to two factors: the not-yet-agreed-upon definition of a green job, and the relative greenness of a job. For the purposes of an ongoing study of the green job market in Minnesota, DEED defined green jobs as those that provided "opportunities to engage in energy or natural resource conservation, renewable energy development, pollution cleanup, [or] pollution reduction."

When they surveyed employers to ask how many job vacancies they had that could be considered green, many were confused and considered all of their jobs green if they had a policy on recycling. "If the [Job Vacancy Survey] results had been accepted based purely on self-reporting, cashier would have been among the top green job titles in Minnesota," authors Alessia Leibert and Nick Dobbins wrote in "Green Jobs in Minnesota," a report on data gathered during the fourth quarter of 2009.

But What Are They Welding?

The other factor, relative greenness, is hard to define without learning more about a specific job and what it entails. DEED examined more than 800 occupations in Minnesota and came up with 80 to 90,000 jobs that could be green, but weren't necessarily, such as welding. "The problem is in knowing what the welder does," Uphoff explains. "They might be making Hummers or they might be making wind turbines." For that reason, DEED followed up its initial survey of 12,000 employers (71 percent of whom responded) with phone calls to map out the actual activities of the employers' job vacancies.

The DEED's question about specific categories helps to define where the green jobs are. The survey asked employers to designate which of five economic sectors a job vacancy fell under: education, regulation, compliance or public awareness; sustainable agriculture or natural resource conservation; energy efficiency or energy conservation; renewable energy or alternative fuels; and environmental cleanup or pollution reduction and prevention.

The researchers also considered the degree of separation from environmental impact to determine whether a job was green or merely green-ish. "A college professor who lectures on environmental issues would not be considered green for our purposes, because there is no immediate green output," Leibert and Dobbins wrote. "However, a researcher in the same academic department who is working on improving solar cell technology may be green, as the work performed would be directly contributing to a green product. If the performance of a job directly results in an environmental benefit, that position will be included as green."

Many green jobs, Uphoff says, are just traditional jobs that have been reformulated. This is particularly true of electrical engineers, many of whom are involved in building and maintaining wind turbines and solar panels.

Greener Greater Minnesota

Given these difficulties, what did the survey actually come up with, using its definition of green work? The numbers are preliminary, but the survey's first findings indicated that about 488 jobs, or 1.8 percent of all job vacancies in Minnesota, could be considered green. And Greater Minnesota, not the metro area, is actually providing more green jobs. Of those vacancies, 64 percent came from the area outside the seven-county metro area. That's in spite of the fact that nearly 60 percent of all openings in the state were in the metro.

That might not sound like much green employment, but Kyle Uphoff says it's right in line with the findings of other states that have conducted similar studies. He says that while other states' methodologies and definitions varied, none has found more than a single-digit percentage in its overall labor market.

There's another aspect of green employment: So far, it's mostly for the educated. DEED's study found that 70 percent of the green job vacancies reported required higher education of some sort; the lion's share, 43 percent, required a bachelor's degree, and another 25 percent required either a vocational or associate's degree.

Room for Growth

When asked whether a given vacancy was new or pre-existing, most respondents said it was new. And that that's why, despite the small numbers, the green labor market matters. The DEED has seen a 37 percent increase in job openings in the last year, which means that the number of green job openings is likely to increase as well. But it's also possible that green technology will eventually have a much stronger impact on the economy. "Introducing a new technology to a market often has a ramping-up effect, where at first it creates few new jobs, but then ramps up quickly and creates exponential growth," Uphoff says. "So this labor segment definitely bears watching."

Holly Dolezalek's last article for The Line was "Can Minnesota Be Another Silicon Valley?"  in our June 2 issue. She writes on technology and business for MinnesotaBusiness, Finance & Commerce, and other publications.


Photos, top to bottom:

Green labor-market researchers for the State of Minnesota. From left, Alessia Leibert, Anne Arthur, Kyle Uphoff, and Nick Dobbins.

The DEED's green-business banner

Kyle Uphoff

Alessia Leibert

Anne Arthur

All photos by Bill Kelley