Rampant Opportunity In The Midst Of A Recession
Editor’s Note: The is a guest contribution by Danny Kennedy, President of Sungevity. This is part of a series from the CEO’s of major solar companies. You can follow the complete series here.
Sometimes it is hard to contemplate what a good news story our industry – solar sales and installation – and the broader clean energy economy really represents. I was reminded on Monday at the graduation ceremony for the Oakland Green Collar Jobs Corps.
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In short, forty diverse, young and not-so-young people graduated from a tough, practical 30 week training course to be job-ready for work in the solar, weatherization and green construction sectors. 8 of them were not able to attend their own graduation, which had the Mayor and the great and good of the East Bay present because they already had jobs!
That is a big deal given that at this time something like 25 – 40% of union electricians in the area are going without work. It speaks to the excellence of their training, their own caliber, and the fact that green collar jobs are hot jobs even in a recession. And cities like Oakland are leading the way out of it with programs like this, which, at a very human level mean a lot to the people involved. They are also important for the whole economy.
Yesterday, I heard someone from the government-backed California Clean Energy Fund say that a clean energy company employs 4 – 5 people more than a non-green company, for every unit of production. And of those jobs created in solar, most are in the community – not short-term construction gigs or heartless factory jobs - but service positions selling systems, installing them on roofs, or maintaining them in other ways.
Obama, the Arnold Schwarzenegger, and everyone on down has been talking about green-collar jobs and workforce development, which is great. There’s a lot more they can do to support the kinds of job creation that are possible with the clean energy economy but I won’t try to tell you just what they should be doing in DC and Sacramento right now with various bills being debated.
But I do want to point out that at the end of the day, people are the limiting factor on the success of the solar industry. It is not just about the hardware. It’s about employees that sell, install and service the solar systems that will make our business’ succeed and grow and spread the sunshine of solar electricity. We have to train more of them for all the functions required to get this great technology onto the rooftops of middle America.
I look forward to the time when there are too many Green Collar Jobs cohorts coming out of various programs nationwide to go to them all. That’s when we’ll know we’re winning! Shine on!
Photo Courtesy greenforall.org via Flickr under Creative Commons License.
I don’t know how much we count as a truly “green company” since we do sell both traditional and eco-friendly promotional items, but I do know that in the last 5 months the largest area of growth we have had is with our eco-friendly products, http://www.proformagreen.com.
And it is because of the increase in demand and sales of the eco-friendly products that we are currently looking for new sales reps.
I agree that growth seems to be green.
I write a lot about Green Entrepreneurs and Green Job Growth on my Green Technology Blog.
Green Collar Jobs are definitely on the rise and something that America needs right now. It’s almost like reinventing the Auto Industry, but with Green Jobs. Between Solar sales/installations and large-scale manufacturing of solar products, wind-turbines, as well as retrofitting gigs, the “Green Collar” jobs are what factories were to people in the “Golden Age”.
Green Jobs promote a sense of possibility and kind of revitalize the “American Dream” in a much cleaner and socially aware way. You don’t need to have a doctorate to make a living thanks to Green Collar jobs. Technology is still key, but there are a lot of decent labor jobs being created for previously unskilled workers.
This is a great trend. If we can promote jobs green color jobs, a whole lot of things would be set in motion. I had tried to do it myself in http://climatarians.org. It is definitely a move in the right direction. Let’s hope more and more people get interested in the green revolution. When jobs are hard to come by, it is amazing to know that people couldn’t attend their own graduation because they were already working.
Truly encouraging!
Joost Hoogstrate