Fixing the Climate STEM Talent Pipeline: Work On Climate’s 2024 Design Summit

In our recent article, co-founder and CEO of Work on Climate, Eugene Kirpichov, writes: “Executing the green transition requires solving hundreds of different workforce and innovation challenges, affecting hundreds of millions of people.”

One big challenge is a shortage of advanced-degree STEM talent: innovative technologies in energy, biotech, and other sectors are facing a shortage of highly qualified engineers and scientists, as well as a notorious lack of diversity.

In 2023, we put together an ecosystem of organizations to tackle this problem in NY/NJ. We’ve been working with it over the past year, culminating in a Design Summit at Climate Week NYC 2024. Now we have strong indication that our approach is working and can be scaled. With our leadership, 9 organizations defined and committed to two-month prototype projects to build out the missing pieces of the diverse advanced-degree STEM talent pipeline into cleantech jobs.

Read on to understand the context, significance, and future of this work!

History of the Advanced STEM Working Group

Like other workforce challenges, the advanced-degree STEM talent shortage is too complex for any organization to solve alone. The “supply chain” of such talent includes STEM educators at all levels in the school system, workforce developers, government agencies, communities, and more — culminating, of course, with employers themselves.

Fall 2023: The Exploratory Gathering

A successful long-term cross-sector collaboration on a challenge begins with gathering organizations affected by the challenge or well-positioned to support solutions. At the gathering, organizations establish a shared understanding of the challenge and initial interest and relationships for tackling it together.

We hosted this gathering at New York Climate Week 2023, recruiting nearly 40 representatives from across the STEM talent and climate ecosystem. Attendees included leaders from national labs, philanthropic organizations, climate accelerators, government agencies, professional societies, and more. We paid utmost attention to assembling a diverse group — 58% of attending stakeholders identified as women or non-binary, and 50% as people of color.

Early 2024: Assembling the Working Group

After the initial gathering, Work on Climate recruited and officially launched our STEM Working Group — a group of 30+ stakeholder organizations committed to working on the challenge together over 9 months. This was not just a discussion group — a condition of group membership was commitment to participate in implementing solutions, and our cadence for the group was designed to culminate in tangible action.

Since April, with our leadership and facilitation, the group built strong relationships, conducted much deeper research, and honed in on 10 specific problem statements, which we then brought to the Design Summit.

The Design Summit

To kick off work on building solutions to the identified bottlenecks in the climate STEM talent pipeline, we hosted another gathering, the Design Summit. We structured the Summit to ensure that participating organizations collectively design solutions to the challenges that are within their power to build, and begin work on prototyping these solutions. The Summit took place at Climate Week NYC 2024, with generous support from Invest In Our Future, NYCEDC, and NYSERDA.

We convened over 50 leaders from organizations such as the Department of Energy, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, National Renewable Energy Lab, Conamix, National Grid, ASME, Rutgers University, NY/NJ DOE and DOL, and many others. Again, we paid utmost attention to diversity: 67% of participants were women and 44% were people of color.

Our goal for the gathering was to catalyze at least three solution prototypes. We exceeded our goal by 3x — 9 participating organizations defined and committed to building prototypes of solutions to the challenges.

Here are just a few of the 9 prototypes lead by various organizations:

• Building Excitement for Cleantech Careers in Schools: This initiative aims to introduce cleantech career awareness into K-12 classrooms, and the prototype begins with internal stakeholder training at the government agency leading this initiative, to prepare it for effective action in the next stage.
• Keeping Foreign-Born National Talent: This solution focuses on retaining foreign-born professionals by creating pathways that allow them to stay in the U.S. and continue their work on climate innovations. The prototype, led by a major university, involves internal research and convenings to identify the possibilities for such pathways.
• Cleantech Career Support for Educators: This flagship initiative, led by Work on Climate (hey, that’s us!) will create a “community of practice” to support all levels of STEM educators in their quest to help their students understand and access cleantech opportunities, supported by a body of cleantech experts called “Cleantech Ambassador Corps”. The next two months are focused on interviewing teachers at several levels of the education system to get a deep understanding of their specific barriers to giving such support and their institutional context.
• Providing Wraparound Supports for Marginalized Groups: This initiative involves creating a “community of practice” to increase the effectiveness of organizations wishing to provide intersectional, wraparound support for women, gender-expansive individuals, and people of color in clean tech education and career pathways; the two-month kick-off involves initial stakeholder interviews, building buy-in, and drafting strategy.

These are not just brainstormed ideas: each of these prototypes was developed by an organization that has committed to leading it over the next two months and designed it to be feasible for themselves to execute. Some projects have gathered support commitments from additional organizations.

While the Working Group’s work is by no means finished, that this milestone already offers strong proof that our approach to solving climate workforce ecosystem challenges is likely to work.

What does the data say?

At Work on Climate, we are obsessive about ensuring that our work actually results in change — and that requires collecting impact data and acting on what we see. So we surveyed the organizations that attended the summit to see what kind of difference it made for them and their readiness to act on this issue.

And what do we see? Well, here’s what:

• 100% are satisfied / very satisfied with their experience
• 100% strongly recommend other organizations to collaborate with Work on Climate on climate talent challenges
• 90% are likely or very likely to use the insights and relationships from this Design Summit in their work
• 90% are strongly or very strongly consider it a priority for their organization to build the diverse climate STEM talent pipeline within the next year
• Most importantly, 86% indicate that they would have been unlikely to be working on these projects if not for Work on Climate — this was our ultimate metric for this gathering.

In the words of two attendees:

“There’s such a big value in gathering a community together around solving a specific problem. Much more impact oriented than gathering for the sake of gathering.” — an attending green workforce development organization

“We were not already planning to have a formal capacity building workshop with [our office], but the Design Summit really highlighted the need to do so and the Working Group has provided us with the support to make the case for why it is needed.” — an attending government agency

Next Steps for the Working Group

Ensuring that our work results in change also requires consistency and follow-through. That’s why, over the next three months, we will continue to support the organizations developing these prototypes, and we are raising funding to support the group’s work on scaling these to full long-term solutions over the next year.

We will also publish a Landscape Analysis with the results of research that the group has conducted, to empower more organizations in NY/NJ and other states to act on the climate STEM talent pipeline.

As the group executes full-scale solutions, we will be looking for ways to scale this work beyond the group. Our leadership of this group puts us in a position to lead or support similar ecosystem-building projects, either focused on this issue in states beyond NY/NJ, or focused on other climate workforce issues having to do with the education system.

What does this all mean?

We have hit a truly significant milestone, with significant implications. Here’s what it means.

• For the participating organizations: Thanks to this group, participating organizations are now more ready for what the green economy needs from them, and for what their students and constituents need. They are also now at the forefront of the change that all of their peers will need to embrace.
• For us and for our funders: This milestone shows that our approach of assembling and leading a group of organizations across the “supply chain” of a specific climate workforce issue is viable, and in the coming months we will get even more signal of that. We have put the funding to great use and we should be doing more of this together.
• For climate action in the US: To our knowledge, this Working Group is the first systemic effort to fix the climate STEM talent pipeline in the US — and this milestone shows that, so far, the effort is on track to succeed and be replicable. This gives us hope, and also means it’s time for others to start replicating this work — it can’t be just us. Reach out to us below if you want to replicate this work in your context!

Let’s Work Together!

We are obsessed with removing workforce and innovation bottlenecks to climate progress — that’s all we do. We are looking for partners and funders to do it together.

Here’s how we can help each other:

• For grantmakers: If you’re a climate grantmaker wishing to be more involved with solving workforce or innovation bottlenecks (for example, because progress in an important solution sector for you is facing such bottlenecks), or a workforce/innovation grantmaker wishing to be more involved with the green economy, we can help you! Email eugene@workonclimate.org. 
• For individuals: If you care about climate progress, and recognize the need for systems change to bring more talent into building solutions, then support our unique work or email eugene@workonclimate.org to learn more before considering a major gift! We also do a lot of work on directly helping individuals — read more in our 2023 Impact Report.
• For all organizations: If climate progress in an area that you prioritize is bottlenecked by human capital, and you have the capacity to partner on a solution, let us know at coalition-interest@workonclimate.org!

Emily Iwankovitsch, Marketing Team Lead and Eugene Kirpichov, Executive Director