New York City’s emerging green economy is poised to become one of the key drivers of job growth over the next decade and beyond, and presents arguably the greatest opportunity in years to expand access to well-paying career opportunities for New Yorkers from low-income backgrounds. But while New York City is home to dozens of innovative workforce training programs—often the first of their kind—that prepare unemployed and underemployed New Yorkers for a range of green-economy jobs, much more work will be needed to align these programs with the evolving needs of an emerging sector.
To its credit, the Adams administration has made some important initial steps toward realizing this opportunity, including several key commitments in the 2024 Green Economy Action Plan. Implementing those proposals—including the creation of green economy training facilities in each borough by 2030 and the expansion of green economy industry partnerships—will be vital to achieving the goal of ensuring equitable access to green economy careers. At the same time, more will have to be done. This report includes nine additional recommendations for growing and strengthening the workforce development and training ecosystem aligned with emerging green careers.
1. LAUNCH A GREEN ECONOMY DATA DASHBOARD AT NYCEDC TO INFORM WORKFORCE PROGRAM
DESIGN AND INVESTMENT. To maximize the effectiveness of public and private sector investments in workforce development programs aligned with the emerging green economy, funders and providers alike will need access to accurate data on employment trends in green-related industries and occupations. But this poses a major challenge today. Neither the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics nor the state Department of Labor publishes data on green economy jobs, which makes it difficult for funders or providers to calibrate their programs to meet real-world labor market needs. Fortunately, the city’s Economic Development Corporation has undertaken and published an extensive analysis of projected job growth in the city’s green economy, which offers a broad view of anticipated trends. But to inform effective new workforce investments going forward, NYCEDC should develop and maintain a comprehensive green economy data dashboard—leveraging the Green Economy Action Plan’s methodology to provide a quarterly window into job growth and skills demand trends across the city’s emerging green sectors, or launching a challenge-based procurement for a new cutting-edge green economy labor market analytics tool. This data dashboard should be developed in partnership with the city's Workforce Development Council and eventually enhanced with data on education and training capacity aligned with key green economy industries and occupations, enabling city policymakers, training providers, and philanthropic foundations to gain a much clearer picture of the access challenges and opportunities in the emerging green economy.
2. LAUNCH A FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND INITIATIVE TO TAP CUNY’S STUDENTS TO BUILD A GREENER UNIVERSITY
—PREPARING THEM FOR GREEN ECONOMY CAREERS. To prepare thousands of mostly low-income, first-generation college students for the green economy jobs that are coming online now and in the years ahead—and help spark the economic growth needed to bring these jobs to fruition—the city should make a major new capital investment in greening CUNY nearly 300 aging buildings, and launch a first-of-its-kind effort to tap CUNY’s students to achieve this. This effort could provide immensely valuable hands-on experience for thousands of CUNY students in areas from architecture, engineering, and materials science, to finance and capital planning, to the building trades, while helping to reduce emissions from a key part of the city’s portfolio. This effort could take advantage of an unprecedented opportunity to harness federal and state funding for building decarbonization efforts, while leveraging the many assets already in place at CUNY and coordinating several existing city, state, and philanthropic investments—from CUNY’s Inclusive Economy Initiative to the state’s approval of tuition assistance for workforce training. In a promising start, SUNY and CUNY will receive $150 million from the state's Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Bond Act to support decarbonization efforts across campuses, but more is needed. Today, CUNY educates a growing number of students earning degrees and certifications in everything from clean energy HVAC and solar power to architecture and engineering to sustainability in the urban environment and offshore wind. At the same time, CUNY is home to the innovative Building Performance Lab, which has hands-on experience in building decarbonization strategies and materials. City College’s Grove School of Engineering already operates cutting-edge renewable energy and building electrification research centers, and the Sustainable CUNY initiative has seeded hundreds of smart campus sustainability actions. This new initiative can succeed in putting CUNY students on the path to green economy careers, while transforming the nation’s
most powerful economic mobility institution into its greenest one, too.
3. DEPLOY AN ELECTRIFICATION CAREERS CHALLENGE GRANT TO SCALE UP TRAINING PROGRAMS FOR HVAC TECHNICIANS AND ELECTRICIANS—TWO KEY OCCUPATIONS IN THE GREEN ECONOMY WHERE DEMAND IS ALREADY EXCEEDING SUPPLY. Although much anticipated hiring demand is yet to materialize as the city’s green economy gets on its feet, two key green-enabling occupations are already experiencing a surge of demand: HVAC technicians and electricians. As of 2023, New York City was home to 25,121 HVAC installers and electricians—and 28,348 jobs in these occupations. With 23 percent of this workforce currently ages 55-plus, this undersupply of talent is poised to grow. To address this gap and help expand access to these careers for New Yorkers from disadvantaged communities, the Adams administration should launch an Electrification Careers Challenge Grant—leveraging federal, state, and private sector funding—to help scale up existing workforce training programs aligned with these two key occupations, including union-linked pre-apprenticeships,
apprenticeships, and direct-entry programs.
4. CREATE A PAY IT FORWARD PROGRAM FOR GREEN ECONOMY TRAINING PROGRAMS THAT DELIVER ON EMPLOYMENT OUTCOMES. Today, most of New York City’s green workforce training programs are small in scale and heavily reliant on short-term public and philanthropic funding. Among the 42 unique green economy training programs profiled in this report, their total training capacity is only around 7,900 New Yorkers per year, and 17 programs serve fewer than 100 people annually. To help build the capacity of these programs and develop new ones aligned with emerging career opportunities, city leaders will need to identify sustainable funding streams that can support effective career training programs. To do so, the Adams administration should create a Pay It Forward program for green economy training programs that work, seeded with dollars from both the public and private sectors. Following the lead of the State of New Jersey, this program would offset the cost of tuition for effective training programs that consistently deliver strong employment outcomes, with graduates repaying the cost of tuition back into the fund—but only if they land a well-paying job after completing the program. This mechanism could provide a reliable source of ongoing funding for programs that prove to be effective, while incentivizing both government and providers to focus on programs that deliver results for their participants.
5. BUILD GREEN JOBS CAREER PATHWAYS INTO THE CITY’S MAJOR APPRENTICESHIP DEVELOPMENT EFFORT.
New York City is taking decisive steps to expand apprenticeship pathways into well-paying careers, working toward a major goal of connecting 30,000 New Yorkers to apprenticeships by 2030. To that end, the city has launched the NYC Apprenticeship Accelerator—an idea initially proposed by the Center for an Urban Future in a 2021 report—and, most recently, issued a new request for proposals for organizations interested in developing new apprenticeship programs. Importantly, the city’s Green Economy Action Plan includes a commitment to deliver 12,000 green economy apprenticeships by 2040. To get there, city and state leaders, unions, and the private sector will have to make new investments in launching and expanding apprenticeship programs aligned with green careers. Governor Hochul and the State Legislature should boost support for the city’s vital effort, with new funding for apprenticeship intermediaries, unions, CUNY, and industry partners to cover program design and start-up costs and create playbooks for supervisors and trainers, and an effort to streamline the process for registering new apprenticeship programs with the state Department of Labor, so that employer partners are able to access existing tax credits. The city should invest in boosting the capacity of the NYC Apprenticeship Accelerator, with a decided staff member overseeing green economy apprenticeship development and launch new RFPs for pre-apprenticeship programs and onramps in the building trades, renewable energy, electric vehicle infrastructure, and sustainable waste management, so that community-based organizations can receive funding to help residents with barriers to training and employment connect with existing and new apprenticeship programs that might otherwise be out of reach. At the same time, the city’s building trades unions should commit to expanding the number of new hires made through pre-apprenticeship pathways, and partner with the NYC Apprenticeship Accelerator to build pathways into the occupations with the greatest number of projected openings in the years ahead, like electricians and HVAC technicians, as a growing number of members reach retirement age.
6. BUILD A CLIMATE TECH FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM TO HELP DIVERSIFY TALENT PATHWAYS INTO EARLY-STAGE GREEN TECH START-UPS. One small but highly promising area within the city’s emerging green economy is the cluster of start-ups focused on climate change, green tech, clean tech, climate finance, and other technology-powered products and services aimed at accelerating the transition toward carbon neutrality. Jobs in these start-ups are poised to grow significantly, as venture capital and institutional investment flows into this sector. Importantly, these early-stage jobs also function as key drivers of wealth creation, as employees gain equity in their companies. Many of these early employees will go on to be the funders and founders of the future. To help expand access to employment opportunities in the city’s green tech ecosystem, new investments will be needed in developing career pathways into green economy start-ups. The city should create a new Climate Tech Fellowship Program—potentially in partnership with Tech:NYC, the city’s Tech Talent Pipeline, and CUNY—aimed at cultivating the next generation of underrepresented tech talent interested in solving climate-related challenges. The Fellowship would provide participants with access to mentors in the industry, networking opportunities, professional development, and paid internship experiences with start-ups and other firms working on climate tech innovation, with the goal of ensuring that more New Yorkers of color are able to get in on the ground floor of the city’s growth-stage green economy start-ups.
7. LAUNCH NYC’S FIRST GREEN ECONOMY OPPORTUNITY FAIR FOR MIDDLE- AND HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS. Many of the students in New York City’s middle- and high schools today are eager to seek out opportunities in the green economy after graduating, but many more simply do not know where to start. In order to expand access to green economy careers, more should be done to boost green career exploration opportunities in the city’s public schools and raise awareness of the postsecondary pathways that exist for a range of green careers. To help address this challenge, the Adams administration should work with New York City Public Schools to launch the city’s first annual NYC Green Economy Opportunity Fair, modeled on the highly successful NYC Computer Science Opportunity Fair (CS Fair), which has grown to become the city’s largest annual college and career inspiration event for public high school students. Like the CS Fair, the Green Economy Opportunity Fair would bring together CUNY and other colleges, postsecondary training providers, and employers for a major showcase of the career opportunities and education and training programs that exist in the city’s green economy, with the goal of inspiring more young people from low-income communities to pursue pathways into green careers.
8. CREATE A GREEN ECONOMY RESKILLING COUNCIL TO HELP DEVELOP AND EXPAND TRAINING IN GREEN SKILLS FOR INCUMBENT WORKERS. Although the growth of the green economy is poised to create thousands of new jobs, a large portion of the city’s current and future green careers will be an adaptation of existing jobs. The Adams administration’s Green Economy Action Plan projects that of the estimated 250,000 jobs added to the city’s green economy by 2040, 175,000 will be current jobs that will become sustainability-focused, whereas only 75,000 will be entirely new jobs. Ensuring equitable access to these transitioning jobs will require a major expansion of reskilling programs for current workers—an area in which New York City has made relatively little investment in recent years. To change this, the city should launch a Green Economy Reskilling Council—a public-private partnership comprising members of the city’s Workforce Development Council and Board, Green Advisory Council, LL97 Mobilization Council, and NYC Talent’s Industry Partnerships—as well as leading training providers, unions, other trade associations, and CUNY. The Council would advise the city and partner organizations on reskilling needs across occupations and industries within the broader green economy and lay the groundwork for a major new investment in reskilling programs between now and 2030.
9. INTEGRATE WRAPAROUND SERVICES INTO WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT CONTRACTS. In addition to growing the city’s workforce training ecosystem for green careers, city leaders should prioritize new investments in wraparound services and other key supports like wage subsidies that can make programs more inclusive and effective. Several organizations interviewed for this report cited a lack of funding for these supports—including stipends and wage subsidies, OMNY cards, and childcare—as a major barrier to participation for the New Yorkers
who would otherwise benefit the most. In addition, programs that are able to offer these supports generally demonstrate better persistence, completion, and post-completion outcomes, suggesting that relatively modest investments in wraparound services can generate a stronger return on investment for public training dollars. The problem is that while some philanthropic foundations provide grants that can be used for these purposes, city workforce contracts generally do not—and federal funding comes with tight restrictions on these uses. To overcome
these obstacles, the city should incorporate flexible city tax levy funding specifically for wraparound services in future RFPs, help workforce providers build capacity to screen participants for benefits eligibility, and pilot new workforce funding designed to test and assess the effectiveness of specific supports on program outcomes.
