Green Workforce Connect and Building Green Pathways with Cynthia Finley

Over the last few years, we’ve been covering New Pathways, which we think of as a framework for school leaders and community members to create supports and systems that set students up for success in what’s next. This might be career exploration, client-connected projects, internships, or entrepreneurial experiences.

But what it really comes down to is connecting learners to real-world experiences and people and helping them articulate the skills that they gain in the process. Along the way, we began to talk a lot about green jobs. Many of the pre-existing pathways in secondary schools point towards CTE programs and trades, which are more in demand than they’ve been in decades.

This coincides with a pivotal moment in the arc of infrastructure redesign and development, one that heavily emphasizes clean energy trajectories and transferable skills. Many of these jobs we refer to as green pathways or requiring some of these green skills. 

One leading organization in this space is the Interstate Renewable Energy Council or IREC. I got to sit down with Cynthia Finley, the Vice President of Workforce Strategy at IREC to talk about green pathways and what IREC is doing to increase awareness and exposure of green jobs and skills. 

Mason: Hey there Cynthia Finley. Could you tell me a little bit about your own pathways and career journey. How did you get to where you are today?

Cynthia: My journey was a little bit bumpy and definitely had some on and off-ramps., I started my career going to a four-year university and I got a bachelor’s degree in psychology and I came out working in public service. So I had a career working with underserved communities both with abused and neglected children in our court system. 

After that, I migrated over to education and public safety. I ended up working and spending a lot of time in Virginia developing and implementing community and education programs specifically to help build out workforce pathways connected to in-demand occupations, but it took many years and many jobs to get there.

That journey included getting a master’s degree and eventually a Ph.D. It was combining my passion for helping others and really making a difference in my community.

That pathway could have been a little bit more streamlined if I had some more information about what careers were available. I wasn’t your typical best student, math was not my strong suit and I didn’t really have a lot of direction when I started out. I knew I wanted to make a difference and help people, but I didn’t really know where to go and how to make those connections. It would have been nice to know about opportunities such as apprenticeship or jobs that I could have had in the interim before racking up mountains of student debt that aren’t easy to pay off when you work in public service. Because of this, I decided that in the work with IREC, especially for these green jobs, we want to really put a focus on making those pathways visible and those connections better for our students.

Mason: Tell me a little bit about the work that IREC is doing along with these pathways. So what are some of the initiatives that you have started and who are the kind of audiences you’re reaching with that work?

Cynthia: So IREC has a long history of working in the green space, particularly in workforce development and education and training. They hold the accreditation for weatherization jobs and we’ve developed curriculum and micro-credentials and training and technical assistance for both education and training providers and employers.

We have a lot of great programs that help with some of those jobs that you don’t even think impact directly green energy, but they do — like coding officials and public safety officials. We also develop pathways for particular audiences, like our solar-ready vets program that focuses on getting veterans into jobs and apprenticeships and solar.

We wanted to really expand on that work and have a stronger connection to the job seeker and bring awareness to what these jobs are. There are a lot of jobs in clean energy., and that’s what’s so great about this industry. We’re sort of everywhere. We’re woven into a lot of different occupations and sectors.

There’s an opportunity for anybody to get involved. We developed career maps. That show a job seeker or anybody who’s interested in getting into the industry, where you can start, what these jobs are and what your pathway could be. So your career opportunities are almost endless. And we really wanted to help expand those maps and bring something a little bit more interactive to that job seeker.

And again, strengthen those connections to that quality training and education that we all need. We work with our partners and bring more visibility to those employers who are doing this great work and who have a need, a huge need for employees, especially if we’re going to build out the clean energy workforce in such a short period of time.

Mason: Yeah, those career maps are super helpful. You mentioned a couple of the jobs that we don’t typically think of as green jobs, can you give me some more examples of jobs that exist within the ecosystem of green that people might not associate?

Like if we’re actually going to ramp up green and green jobs in that workforce, what else do we need to be thinking about and doing in the meantime?

Cynthia: I like to say that a green job is like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, right? You could almost run a line anywhere with green jobs, right? In any industry. And I love that we can do that because we make it available and interesting to people who might not want to get into solar. Maybe they don’t want to do a particular job or what they envision clean energy to be. But there’s a whole host of jobs and weatherization and construction. So bringing energy efficiency to our home that includes, you know, appliance, mechanical work, weatherizing the homes through construction and energy efficiency techniques, solar jobs. Obviously, in solar alone there are numerous jobs that someone can do. And what’s really nice is that a lot of these jobs, you can come in at an entry-level, but really work your way up. So it’s not just you stay at that one level forever. There’s a huge need for the grid interconnecting to the grid, modernizing the grid, and those might be higher-level positions. If someone’s interested in going to school, they really got bitten by the energy bug. There are HVAC, coding officials and energy auditors, jobs within a county or a city and municipalities, IT, there’s manufacturing and logistics, and there’s a wide variety of jobs and other sectors that really touch and are dependent. 

Or you might think I just have to be an electrician, but there are a whole host of jobs attached to any one of these industries. So it’s what makes it kind of nice is that it’s flexible and pretty expansive.

Mason: Totally. Yeah. I toured a cool project-based school in Colorado called the STEAD School where they have three pathways for their students to start getting affiliated with different jobsand it’s all environmental-related. So you have two of the pathways strands, like ag veterinary and environmental science and they’re like, and we’ve cross-referenced it and we can identify at least 7,500 different jobs that these three like sort of work into, which is amazing.

As we’ve just highlighted there are tons of viable pathways, but additionally there are numerous skills that these various trades must acquire and continually hone. What are some of the most in demand transferable or durable skills that prospective green employees should have?

Cynthia: So I think there are definitely skill set gaps that each particular sector, might want to address — I think there’s an opportunity to really learn about clean energy as a whole. For example, how do these jobs really impact clean energy? Your job might seem really small, but how do you fit into that bigger picture, right? 

Some of these trade type positions, or maybe more entry-level positions, can be difficult physical work. You might be climbing under a home to weatherize a home. You might be up in someone’s attic. You might be climbing on a roof to install solar panels. And so the culture and the climate of the work and the occupations I think are also really important, but just to be able to have those critical thinking skills, the communication skills to be able to work with, depending on your job to be able to work.

Mason: The physical labor component is kind of great in this current job market as well, because for now its pretty guaranteed job stability as robotics and AI really struggle to make discrete physical gestures. So much of this pathways work involves exploration and exposure and we believe that really belongs in high school (and earlier). What is IREC currently doing to reach high school students?

Cynthia: At IREC, we’ve launched our strategy for workforce development called Green Workforce Connect which brings awareness to job seekers who are currently in the market or thinking about transitioning into clean energy. So just like what we talked about, what are these jobs? What is the detail? What does it look like? Let me see some actual footage of people who do these jobs. 

At its core, we’re really interested in making sure we create a diverse and equitable career pathway for these students and for job seekers. So that’s also at the core of what we’re trying to do. But the goal will be to bring that awareness to the K-12 space or the CTE space and to share that curriculum and help build out that curriculum for the in-demand industry that these students might be experiencing.

And with any industry, it is not a one and done. This is a growing industry. The technology is changing where it’s moving at a rapid pace. So we want to be an intermediary through our National Clean Energy Workforce Alliance to help keep that curriculum and training up to speed with what aligns with the industry, but then bring that awareness to that K-12 system. Our hope is to work with K-12 and CTE programs across the country to really bring that awareness component and provide resources that educators can use in their classroom: toolkits and technical assistance training that we might be able to provide students with some practical experience while they’re in school, there are some great programs in the country right now who are doing just that across the country.

There’s one in Virginia that developed a youth solar technician apprenticeship program. Students get hands-on experience building solar panels, earn $17 an hour, get college credit for it, and they got some experience to really check out this field to see if it was something they might be interested in. And if, at the end of that, they were graduating and there were positions open, they automatically partnered with an electric utility company.

And those students were hired at the end of that apprenticeship if they wanted to go into work there. So giving them those opportunities, and as many as we can, and aligning that with the curriculum. Where you learn about the history of energy, you learn about solar, really learning all the mechanics of all of these things. 

In New York and Virginia they have short-term credentialing programs for solar. You can go in, take a course to be a photovoltaic installer, come out with an industry credential there, and then you can, you know, go pursue a job at that point. But a lot of colleges also have stackable credentials, so there might be, you might come in in solar, and it might be a stackable credential on your way to become an electrician, creating different on and off ramps that a student can pursue to expand in that career pathway. That said, not every employer is looking for a credential. A lot of times they’re just, they’re looking for someone that they can train, or they’re looking for someone who’s had some experience or some training, so it’s not necessary that you have to have all of that in your back pocket, and that’s where it’s important to really connect to those employers to find out what they’re looking for.

Mason: That’s super helpful. I have a few questions from some students I’d love to ask you. “Say you have the internet, but you’re like 15, 16, and you care a lot about the environment. What is something I should be googling to figure out more about this emerging job space?”

Right now we’re at an interesting space where a lot of folks might not be one degree removed from somebody who has a job that is evidently in clean energy. There are some people and that’s going to be obviously growing a ton over the next 3, 5, 10 years. But if you’re young and non connected to current green workers but you want to make a positive impact on the environment and the energy transition, where would you look?

Cynthia: There are a couple of things I would suggest that folks do. First I would narrow down what you’re interested in. As we’ve discussed, there are a lot of different energy issues or clean green jobs or clean energy. There’s climate resiliency, green spaces, water, etc. So I think kind of looking at what all those things are, what does it mean to be in clean energy or that green space and really find out what you gravitate towards in terms of those interests.

Some of the resources I’ve already mentioned are a great place to start — our career maps, Green Workforce Connect. So, IREC’s a good place to start and really see what kind of what those jobs look like and kind of reach out to the employers in your community to get to learn a little bit more about what they’re doing and the impact they have that you’re interested in making. But then more practically, try to get some hands-on experience. There are a lot of great programs for youth, the Kid Wind Challenge is one, that comes to mind. And that’s sort of a hands-on design that lets students, enter this competition. It’s through the lens of wind and solar energy. So they join teams and they design and construct and test small-scale wind turbines or solar structures, and then they go to these competitions that are all over the world and they’re amazing.

There’s the Clean Energy Youth Apprenticeship that lets you look at if you’re interested in pursuing a career in clean energy or energy efficiency. It’s a great launching pad to what those pathways look like.

Definitely take a look at your community colleges and your four-year institutions as well. So there’s a lot of places to just, a lot of places on the internet to do some research, but I think going to these vetted partners like your community colleges or the Clean Energy Youth Apprenticeship or your own high school would be a great place to start.

Mason: Yeah, even just doing the first tier of research to figure out what clean energy assets you already have in your community so that you can leverage that local connection.

Cynthia: And there are a lot of great mentor programs in states. She’s In Power is in Colorado and they hook up students with women, with girls, women, students with women in the industry to really kind of mentor them through how they got in the industry, you know, what was their pathway, what does that look like?

So really finding those mentorship opportunities, building your network and your social capital. Even things as small as just learning about the energy efficiency in your own home, you know? Someone gave a great example just last week of leaving your phone charger in — even if your phone’s not attached, it’s still using energy or the difference between plugging in your cell phone at night to charge and the drain that that has on the grid. We all share that grid versus everybody using their energy at the same time. And so really learning about what some of that even means in your own community is a great place to start.

Lastly, you can just reach out to me on LinkedIn. I mean, we’ve got the National Clean Energy Workforce Alliance. If we don’t have a direct connection, we know somebody who does, and we often get a lot of emails just that, you know, click the more information on our website. Those emails absolutely make their way to myself or my staff and we answer every single one of them. I take meetings all the time with folks, and it might not even be things that I particularly can help you with, but we are definitely passionate about what we’re doing and we’ll always connect you to somebody in your area. And that’s what we’re working to do is really build out that repository of resources nationwide.

So that our employers can connect with one another and, and, you know, find out what everyone’s doing and training folks can too, but really for students and job seekers as well.

Mason: Amazing. Another question from a student, “we live with a lot of volatile weather patterns between flooding and fires and news of melting ice caps and it’s hard not to be overwhelmed. What new developments or technologies have you learned about that make you optimistic about the future?” 

Cynthia: There’s a company here in Charlottesville, Virginia that built a building there in clean energy, and it is like zero carbon footprint. Everything is recycled down to the nails, the siding. Everything in that building was repurposed or reused, and it’s, it’s completely energy efficient. There is a solar panel on every part of that building that they could put a solar panel on. There are little picnic benches and they’re covered. They have solar panels on top. Their parking deck has solar panels everywhere. There are solar panels on every inch of the roof that they could get a solar panel on., but everything was recycled, and repurposed.

It is completely energy-efficient and eco-friendly in every way. And it was done intentionally and it took a whole host of folks to be able to pull that off., replicating that in other places is going to be gigantic and revolutionizing kind of that, you know, those advancements. And I think that’s going to be gigantic, especially for communities that maybe don’t envision themselves like, you know, they don’t, they might not think, well, that’s the way we’ve never done it. We can’t do it before. Seeing one person do it, I think is contagious and that innovation will spread for sure.

This generation brings a perspective that my generation or the one before it, we don’t have to that point of we’ve never built a building that way, but your generation, younger generations can look at the same thing and see something totally unique based on their own experiences and their passion. And you don’t have to necessarily wait to kind of get involved and play around with it, or really spark something in your own community.

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Cynthia Finley

Cynthia Finley serves as the Vice President of Workforce Strategy at the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC). In her role, she leads efforts to develop robust workforce strategies that support the clean energy transition. Cynthia brings over 20 years of experience in workforce development, policy advocacy, and strategic planning. Her career is marked by a commitment to fostering diversity and inclusion within the energy sector, ensuring that all individuals have access to training and employment opportunities. Cynthia holds a Master’s degree in Public Administration and is a recognized leader in the field, frequently speaking at industry conferences and contributing to key publications on workforce innovation and sustainability.