A new article and accompanying infographic from the Visual Capitalist rates and orders an extensive list of occupations based on their risk of exposure to COVID-19. The COVID risk score assigned to each occupation is between 0 and 100. The infographic includes only 100 of the most well-known occupations, but the article provides a more complete dataset comprised of nearly 1,000 occupations.
While some of the findings of this analysis are obvious (e.g. healthcare workers are at greater risk of exposure to the virus than economists), there are less obvious insights to be gleaned by analyzing the broader dataset. One of those insights is that there are dozens of occupations in the clean energy industry that fall within the top 25th percentile of safest occupations included in the Visual Capitalist’s analysis. These occupations include jobs ranging from Wind Energy Engineers (10.1 Risk Score) and Solar Photovoltaic Installers (14.3 Risk Score) to Surveyors (11.8 Risk Score), Construction and Building Inspectors (15.3 Risk Score), Technical Writers (15.8 Risk Score), Supply Chain Managers (20.6 Risk Score), and Public Relations Specialists (22.2 Risk Score).
In fact, out of the 1,000 occupations analyzed by the Visual Capitalist, more than 180 relate to clean energy in some manner. And all of these occupations fall within the top 50th percentile of the safest occupations included in the analysis. The visual below captures this information and highlights a few common positions in the clean energy industry.
Contained in the observation above is another potentially less obvious insight – the clean energy industry provides millions of jobs that extend far beyond engineering and contracting positions. As was noted in a recent paper of ours, Put Five Million Americans Back to Work Building Our Clean Power Future, the majority of jobs in the clean energy sector are in management, administrative, sales, and manufacturing positions, meaning Americans of all skillsets and backgrounds can find new work building the clean power future.
Considering that many of the jobs in industries that have been hit hardest by COVID-19 – i.e., hospitality, food service, and travel – may be lost forever, or at least may require a significant amount of time to return, it’s vital that we find opportunities to transfer those skillsets to other industries that are safer, can accommodate a diverse range of workers, and are engines of job creation – the clean energy industry is exactly that.