Shortlist Digest: Launching Africa Climate Careers Network (October 2023)

Across Africa (and around the world), young professionals are waking up to a “climate moment”: they can see the looming crisis, they want to do something about it, but it’s not clear what to do next.

As the climate imperative starts to take over all sectors, transforming our modern economy at a speed and scale the world has never seen, we’re starting to see a proliferation of climate-related career options. Some of these career paths are relatively new (E&S consultants, solar and wind engineers, net zero analysts, carbon accountants, etc.) and some are old jobs applied in new contexts (sales, marketing, finance, and more). If you’re a young person in Africa, how do you figure out where you fit?

We’re now proud to launch the Africa Climate Careers Network as the hub for young professionals looking to transition into climate careers. (See press release here.). ACCN builds on Shortlist’s five years of running clean energy talent programs across Africa (such as Women For Green Jobs funded by GEAPP and Energy Access Talent Initiative funded by Carbon Trust and UK’s FCDO), and will be a centralized platform for these programs and other climate talent programs we’ve got in the works. But we look forward to offering a variety of other free resources and support as well:

• The continent’s largest climate-focused job board, already with nearly 150 companies and over 1,000 open jobs.
• Free programs introducing climate topics, emerging climate-related careers, how to prepare for them, and how to approach a job search.
• A virtual community, offered in partnership with Localized, to offer webinars, networking, and more — we’ve got a number of ideas in the works and look forward to offering this to employers, training institutions and others as a space to engage with our growing community of climate-curious young professionals.

We’ve had over 250,000 young people apply to our various programs, but sadly we’ve only been able to place about 1% of those applicants into jobs. We hope this now helps us add value and lend support to everyone else.

Interested to partner? Get in touch! We are eager to collaborate on training programs, career content, job fairs, job openings, and other resources we can offer here.

Happy hiring,

Paul