UX careers in climate guide #1: job boards
Get a jorb
Last updated May 20th 2024
Climate careers series introduction
70% of the readers of this newsletter want a climate job1 . This short series summarizes the research I’m doing while looking for my own role.
Job boards! There are several climate-related boards with names like Climatetechjobs.jobbies or GreenJobs.wow — but which ones are worth our time?
Future issues may look at other pathways to employment, such as volunteering, specialist recruiters, and manifesting.
For the 10% of readers who already have a climate job - get in touch if you have tips to share.
The Short Version
Probably the useful places to look for UX / Product jobs are the Designing for Good Slack jobs channel and the Climate Base website. However there is no one aggregator collecting all the UX climate jobs, so it’s worthwhile checking the rest of the list.
There are also several closed/paid communities that promise climate recruitment opportunities, like TeraDo. I haven’t checked them out yet.
JOB BOARDS LIST
Score note: The score next to each site is the count of UX or Product jobs I found listed between April 1st and May 5th. (Thanks to Mathijs Sterrenburg for suggesting some of these.)
Top 2 sources
Design gigs for Good — Slack (18)
I was surprised that a Slack group came out top tbh. It’s straightforward to join — just send a request.
Climate Base (11)
Nice feature: search by specific drawdown solutions. Want to work on biogas or blue hydrogen?
Tip: the Role Type selector is a little odd. UX roles seem to be spread across different categories.
About Climate Base:
A for-profit company
Upload a profile, get reviewed by recruiters
Salary shown in about 50% of ads
Ethics: the Climate Base about page had this gem: “We care deeply about our mission, our community, and our team mates, and we work very, very hard. If you want a chill, cushy job, this we won't be the right fit for you.” Hustle porn?
Sample roles:
Product Design Director at EcoVadis (business reporting)
Senior UX researcher, Monta (an EV company)
Other boards worth checking
Not all jobs go to the Top 2. I found plenty of roles in the list below that hadn’t been cross-posted.
Climate tech list (“many”)
This one is more about researching organizations, not a list of jobs. Means you have to drill down to the matching job. Their Airtable iFrame integration makes this process slow and awkward.
Don’t trust the job count. For instance, several of the 34 hits for “UX designer” led to dead ends.
Climate draft (~10)
“Your free on-ramp to climate tech”. Lots of startups and European companies.
Some jobs don’t seem relevant - Director of UX at Beekeeper for example
ClimateAction.tech Slack (2)
#jobs-and-volunteering Also, their newsletter.
Mostly posts developer jobs, but 2 UX / Product roles were mentioned recently.
Women and Climate Slack (?)
Social impact job boards
Idealist (7)
All sorts of social impact jobs including climate.
Tech jobs for good (7)
UX strategist at Threepoint: an agency working with impact orgs.
Head of Product at Archive.org ($140k).
UX designer at Get Well network ($100k).
Big tech
I didn’t find any specifically-climate related UX / Product jobs at the big 2. Seems the best bet is to look for general UX jobs, and then drill down to the more climate-focused parts of their business.
Google
Try Cloud roles.
Microsoft
The “sustainability” keyword performed best, finding 429 roles — none product or design. Departments to watch: Microsoft Sustainability, Sustainability Cloud.
Bubbling under
Terra.do : 6 UX roles
All Hands : ~ 3 roles
greenjobsboard.us Non-profits like Environment Defense Fund endorse this, but zero hits for UX or design.
environmentjob.co.uk- UK focus. One UX job, but it’s for the RSPB.
Hall of shame
www.climatejobslist.com - misleading counts
This site will return a result like below (24 hits for product design), but the actual result might just show one job, or none.
Trad boards bad
LinkedIn (0 -♾️)
I haven’t found a way to filter results down to climate-relevant jobs. “UX + climate” just returns regular non-climate UX jobs. Shame they don’t have a way to filter by “social impact” or similar.
LinkedIn profile-driven job recommendations
Despite my portfolio having a few mentions of sustainability and climate change, LinkedIn’s algorithm hasn’t served me any climate-adjacent roles yet.
Indeed (???)
A “UX Climate” search worked better than on LinkedIn. First result for a Strategy Lead at a climate solutions firm. The rest of the results were just general hits on the word “climate”, as in “we operate in a climate of fear and suspicion”. Or this posting for McDonalds, which came up under “sustainability”.
Closed communities & fellowships
Work on Climate
As of April 2023, WoCl has helped more than 1,900+ members find work in climate and grown a community of more than 20,000 members in less than three years.
Fellowship boards
Typically selling 12 week courses, these boards offer a closed community, networking opportunities, expert speakers, yadda yadda.
I have no idea if these offer value or not.
Terra.do - 12 week course. “Over a thousand alumni have found their climate solution”. $1,990.
Climatebase fellowship. Also 12 weeks, also $1990, what’s going on ?!
OnePointFive $1,190.
Stray thoughts
UX at a climate org OR “Climate UX”
Are you looking for regular UX work, but at a more ethical climate-focused org? Or are you hoping for “Climate UX” (which I may have made up). Climate UX, if it exists, would combine sustainability principles with UX. An example would be defining Desgin Ops along ESG lines.
Non-profit, for-profit, start-up, other?
So far it looks like there are many more UX / product jobs at startups than anywhere else.
Social enterprise & greenwashing
S-corp, B-corp, 1%-for-planet, Green Web Label… there are a lot of ways for a company to signal that they are operating on ethical values. I’ll need another issues to dig into this, but my advice is investigate all claims.
Agency route
There are agencies with a good record on climate projects: MightyBytes in the US or WholeGrain in the UK to name two.
Trends
I noticed a lot of jobs at ESG / CSR reporting startups, responding to pending legislation requiring more robust ESG accounting. Good news for folks looking for enterprise UX roles in climate.
Much more
So you want to work in climate
From Nicole Kelner a massive spreadsheet of job boards (83 are listed), communities, recruiters, educational resources.
Good luck
We’re all counting on you.
Climate job : for my purposes, this means either a job at an organization that engages primarily in climate work, or a role that encompasses sustainability & climate change in some way. This could mean a lot of different things: doing product design for a Solar Startup, managing a design team at a non-profit that helps climate refugees, being a UX researcher focused on green cloud infrastructure at a Google or Microsoft.