Transfer Your Skills to a Green Job with Work on Climate’s Eugene Kirpichov
Eugene Kirpichov had a great job as a software engineer at Google. But he left it all behind. As he expressed in a resignation letter that went viral on LinkedIn, “the scale, urgency and tragedy of climate change are so immense that I can no longer justify to myself working on anything else.” That letter, which urged others to follow suit, set the course for his career path. He would go on to co-found the wildly successful Work on Climate community, which today boasts more than 20,000 members. It’s been lauded everywhere from Fast Company to The New York Times. In the latest installment of The Year of the Climate Job, Kirpichov shares how you can take stock of your own skills, which are likely far more climate-ready than you realize. And he shares his vision for making climate work “mainstream,” along with how he and his co-founders started Work on Climate as a Slack community and built it into the mighty army of planet-saving professionals that it is today.
Degrees: Real talk about planet-saving careers · Daniel Hill, Eugene Kirpichov
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Show Notes
Eugene Kirpichov co-founded Work on Climate, an online community for people passionate about solving the climate crisis, in 2020. Prior to WoC, Kirpichov spent more than seven years as a software engineer with Google. But learning how severe the climate crisis was, he felt he could no longer stay in his job. The resignation letter he shared on LinkedIn went viral.
Read the transcript of this episode
Resources from this episode:
- Join Eugene Kirpichov’s Work on Climate community.
- Join other climate-specific communities:
- Read Kirpichov’s goodbye-to-Google letter.
- Check out the Climate Change and AI report that helped Kirpichov understand which of his skills were transferable.
- Browse other climate-related job boards:
- To find people to follow on LinkedIn, visit LinkedIn’s Top Voices in the Green Economy list.
- Search the hashtag #OpenDoorClimate on LinkedIn to find climate professionals who are willing to chat with you. (This is the movement founded by Daniel Hill. Year of the Climate Job host and director of Environmental Defense Fund’s Innovation Fund.)
- Sign up for the Degrees newsletter.
- Here are some articles we love::
Related episodes:
- How to network for a green job with purpose-driven LinkedIn expert Nick@Noon
- Browngirl Green’s Kristy Drutman: Taking the mystery out of finding a green job
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Who makes Degrees?
Degrees: Real talk about planet-saving careers is presented by Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Daniel Hill hosts The Year of the Climate Job. Yesh Pavlik Slenk hosts Degrees. Amy Morse is EDF’s producer. Podcast Allies is our production company. Stephanie Wolf is senior producer; Kevin Kline is our audio editor; Andrew Parrella is our production manager; Elaine Appleton Grant is CEO of Podcast Allies and Tina Bassir is podcast manager. Our music is Shame, Shame, Shame from Yesh’s favorite band, Lake Street Dive.
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