Our 2023 Community Impact Report
Introduction
Since our founding in 2020 we have been working hard to help people like you, who are looking to find a job in climate, launch a climate company, or network with others in the climate space.
We want to make sure that what we do for you is as helpful as possible. In late 2022, we conducted a research project from your input to measure how helpful our programs have been to you. Since then, we’ve been working on making improvements based on what we learned.
We’ve done it again for data up to the end of 2023, and the numbers are in. We are so thankful to all of you who participated in the survey! Read on to learn more about the people in our community, their goals, and our success at helping people with these goals — perhaps you will recognize yourself behind the numbers!
Are we helping people find climate jobs?
78% of you are looking for a climate job — primarily in full-time roles (86%) or freelance/consulting roles (45%). We are here to help. So, how are we doing?
Who are the jobseekers in our community? They are most commonly female (54%), most commonly 25-34 (33%) or 35-44 (36%) years old, and primarily located in the United States (71%). 73% have more than 6 years of work experience, with a significant portion working in for-profit sectors (33%), as consultants/freelancers (20%), or not currently employed (28%).
Is it working? 81% of job seekers found Work On Climate’s programs helpful: 70%+ browsed job postings, applied for a job in climate work, networked, and/or gained skills or knowledge related to their search.
We are proud to report that, overall, at least 2,301 members found a climate job AND credit Work On Climate with helping their search 🎉
What should we improve? We hear your requests for better-organized job postings, more opportunities for networking with employers, and more job-related coaching opportunities! Stay tuned for our planned improvements to the community experience for jobseekers.
Are we helping people build climate companies?
In this round of our research, we expanded our scope beyond job seekers, and investigated the experiences of founders in our community. 16% of you reported being a founder or wishing to become one, mostly in the ideation (45%) and pre-seed funding stage (24%), with another 10% at seed, and 5% series A or B.
Who are the founders in our community? Founders and aspiring founders in our community are most commonly male (54%) and located in the United States (53%), in urban areas (61%), and aged between 35-44 years (42%). 30% have over 20 years of experience, with many working in for-profit private startups (35%).
What are people looking for? Founders in our data are looking for help finding customers (50%), support with business model planning and validation (43%), and raising capital or non-dilutive funding (38%).
Is it working? 40% of founders in our data report that WoCl has been helpful to them with learning skills (14%), customer research (12%), peer support (11%), finding customers (8%), and more. Another 34% reported that they are “still new”, and we hope to help them as they ramp up!
Overall, we estimate that 831+ founders credit Work On Climate with helping with one or more important steps on their founding journey 🎉
What should we improve? Founders are asking us to provide more networking opportunities, and busy founders find the volume of content on Work On Climate overwhelming at times and ask for better organization. We also aim to better support diverse founders: Caucasian founders in our data had more favorable experiences with WoCl than Black founders, and the survey didn’t capture any Hispanic founders.
Our new program for founders, and many of the changes in baseline community experience that we’ve made in the last few months since collecting the data, addresses many of these pain points.
Our methodology
In February 2024 our volunteer Impact Research Team sent you a carefully-designed online survey. We collected information from a sample of 459 respondents (thank you!) who signed up to be a Work On Climate member through email or Slack. Then we applied a variety of survey analysis techniques to clean the data and correct for sampling / non-response biases.
What’s next?
Based on what we learned from you, here’s where we’re going:
- We’re investing more into baseline community infrastructure, making the community easier to navigate and exploring ways to make it easier for you to meet exactly the people you need.
- We’re doubling down on our program for founders, focusing on supporting the earliest-stage founders (including those of you still in the ideation stage) with crucial entrepreneurial skills.
- Overall, we are focusing on making our community more strongly connected and more helpful to people at different career stages (including those who already have a climate job or run a company), creating the community momentum for our work to create a green transformation in the workforce at large.
P.S. This is very hard work for us as a small non-profit, and we need more funding to keep doing it well. Can you help us? Email me if you know someone who could be interested in funding our unique work, or support us personally — our eyes light up when we see that someone appreciates our work 🤩 — Eugene.
This post brought to you by Emily Iwankovitsch, volunteer Marketing Team Lead, Eugene Kirpichov, co-founder and Executive Director, and our Impact Research Team.
