Last Updated on October 10, 2023
Jobs in sustainable architecture, construction and urbanism are still hard to find.
This article dives into our activities of searching and posting jobs, highlighting what we’ve learned on the road and the challenges we’ve faced in finding opportunities in sustainable architecture and related fields. Furthermore, the report gives an insight into the job scene in sustainable built environments across Europe and it’s also a chance for us to celebrate our wins and figure out where we should focus next in tackling our mission.
We started our exciting journey at build_shift a little over a year ago by searching the internet for impactful jobs in sustainable architecture, circular building, participatory design, equitable urban development and more, with the aim of going beyond the few big companies you find on most job sites. While we have never lost sight of job search and posting, we have continuously added new activities to our platform, all aimed at making purposeful actors, initiatives and opportunities visible and enabling connections between the people behind the sustainability movement and the building transformation (see Beyonds, Spotlight series, education database, the Slack community and the recent blog).
build_shift’s mission is to bring together in one place all relevant job opportunities in the field of sustainable architecture, green and circular building and the creation of just and healthy living environments across Europe that are currently scattered on the internet. Through our international approach, our focus on sustainability, equality and the built environment, and our attention to fair working conditions, we aim to contribute to a much needed change.
But now, let’s go to the facts!
Every week we post a collection of job vacancies from different countries on our platform. Since our launch in July 2022, we have posted a total of 1033 jobs from 26 different European countries, which is an average of 16 new jobs per week. Of the 1033 vacancies, 837 were job offers and 64 were (paid) PhD calls, while 132 of the vacancies were internships.
Most of the jobs listed have been scouted by us, although some of the organisations have also started uploading them themselves via our form 🙂yay.
At this point we would like to emphasise once again that we see this platform as a tool to bring together as many work opportunities as possible and we are happy about every person and every action that helps us to do this. We don’t see ourselves as the people from above, but rather as enablers of sharing. So if you have a hot tip for a job, organisation or mailing list that could be helpful to us AND of course to our community, please get in touch! (Sometimes it can be as simple as tagging us in a LinkedIn or Instagram post).
Countries and Location: Where do we find the most and best job offers?
Below is a comprehensive table presenting the countries featured on build_shift, along with the respective counts of job offers, organisations, and different locations within each country.
| Country | Job offers | Organisations | Locations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | 290 | 172 | 53 |
| United Kingdom | 155 | 78 | 31 |
| France | 136 | 91 | 57 |
| Netherlands | 116 | 61 | 16 |
| Belgium | 90 | 53 | 22 |
| Denmark | 33 | 19 | 5 |
| Italy | 33 | 19 | 15 |
| International/Remote | 26 | 16 | n.a. |
| Switzerland | 20 | 11 | 14 |
| Spain | 19 | 13 | 6 |
| Austria | 18 | 15 | 6 |
| Norway | 17 | 8 | 4 |
| Sweden | 15 | 9 | 6 |
| Portugal | 14 | 9 | 4 |
| Ireland | 11 | 7 | 4 |
| Finland | 7 | 5 | 4 |
| Outside Europe | 6 | 5 | 5 |
| Romania | 6 | 5 | 3 |
| Luxembourg | 5 | 4 | 3 |
| Hungary | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Greece | 3 | 2 | 2 |
| Cyprus | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Lithuania | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Slovenia | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Slovakia | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Estonia | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Ukraine | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Moldova | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| ▼ Expand to show all countries | |||
Although we try very hard to look for and publish job offers from all parts of Europe, the distribution is clearly skewed towards some Western and Central European countries. There are even countries that unfortunately do not appear at all in our job offers (on the other hand, we also exceptionally and for various reasons advertised some jobs (6) that were outside Europe (Mexico, Indonesia, Tunisia, Oman, Lebanon). Furthermore, among the total posts only 28 positions were remote while 11 were located across different countries.
Even though the team behind build_shift has a good knowledge of the different European countries and languages, we are far from covering all of them and our knowledge and resources are limited and not the same everywhere. Consequently, our scouting depth varies from region to region.
Nevertheless, the figures above may reflect to some extent the reality on the ground, and although every figure counts for the shift towards sustainability, much more needs to happen in the countries in the second half of the table. We at build_shift want to highlight this gap and emphasise how important it is to strive for sustainability in every region!
If you would like to see more job offers from your country or the country whose language you speak, don’t hesitate to contact us and let’s see how we can work together to bring the construction revolution to the regions of Europe that have not yet been touched. Or if you think that we should definitely not overlook someone or even your organisation, let us know, let us get in touch or send us your job vacancies.
What about greenwashing?
On the other hand, greenwashing was found everywhere, which unfortunately shows once again that unethical companies are willing to profit from the sustainability movement wherever you look (this is just an impression we got from our work experience, no data was collected on this of course, as we only focus on the GOOD opportunities 🙂 out there).
Outstanding examples are those who put a tree in a rendering and now claim to be sustainable (even though everything is built out of concrete by architectural workers in dubious working conditions), those who have less than 2 stars on Glassdoor but call their team family, the oil company that is looking for architects to put a wooden facade on their headquarters, or the calls that say they create buildings and cities for all but don’t bother to use gender neutral language (and their team page is exclusively male, white and old).
What were the topics and task of the job offers we found?
The job posts on our platform are categorised and filterable based on a set of main features:
- Topics – a set of categories adapted to the specifics of the built environment which address current developments in the field
- Tasks – the main activities the job requires
- Type – the employment characteristics
What about the requirements of the jobs?
Two other characteristics we use to classify jobs are language and experience required. While language filters were used from the beginning, the experience filter was introduced later (March 2023) and we have no data on the period considered.
What are we taking from all this?
Even though 1.000 job posts might not seem like a large number compared to other job boards, we are very proud of this achievement: collecting and posting all these jobs was not always an easy task, often requiring a lot of time and commitment on our part. But in the process we got to know many actors, projects and initiatives and got the urge to find many more. The feedback from followers and supporters has also helped to motivate us to continue our work and continuously expand it with new and interesting side projects. Although we also had many supporters from the organisations we featured, still not enough of them supported our work through voluntary payments, but more about that in our financial report 🙂.
Do you like what we are doing and want to support our mission?
Every little bit of help is important, so remember to make a contribution now! Just 5€ via Paypal to hello@build-shift.com can make a big difference. All the money raised goes directly back into the project!🙂yay
