He was dissatisfied with the tech world, and at the same time, he had a young child and felt the urgency of acting on the climate crisis. With tech jobs, “the pay was great, and I got to work on some great projects,” he says. “But I wasn’t really getting that life satisfaction. I wanted to be stoked and excited for Monday mornings again.”

The challenge: He wasn’t sure how to make the change. “The job listings that I was looking at seemed unapproachable and hyper-specific,” he says. It wasn’t clear how his previous experience would apply.

The number of green jobs keeps growing, and so does the number of people who want to change careers and work in those jobs. Work on Climate, a Slack group for career-changers started by a former Google engineer, now has more than 30,000 members. But the transition can be hard, even for experienced professionals.

“Often people get told, ‘You don’t have direct experience in the field,’ or recruiters tell them, ‘I don’t know how what you’ve done before is applicable to what we’re trying to do here,’” says Marco Morawec, cofounder of Climate Drift, an accelerator for mid-career professionals who want to work in climate. It’s common, he says, for professionals who could easily get jobs in their own fields to struggle to find a new climate role—and companies working on climate tech are missing out on talented workers who could help the companies succeed.

Olafson decided to go through the eight-week-long Climate Drift program, which he credits with helping him figure out how to showcase his transferrable skills and land a job he loves. (The program, designed to fit into someone’s schedule while they’re still working, includes daily classes available live or on-demand.) If you’re looking for a job in climate, here’s how the basic approach works.

1. Find your niche

Since tackling climate change involves decarbonizing the entire economy, the range of possible jobs is huge. You might work for a solar company or on EVs—or you might join a company that’s redesigning cement, pulling CO2 from the air, building better batteries, planting trees after wildfires, or working on one of dozens of other solutions.

The first step is finding an area that’s a fit. “You need to focus,” says Morawec. “You can’t be like, ‘Hey, I want to work in climate.’ That doesn’t work.” In the Climate Drift accelerator, participants dive into different sectors each week, from energy to transportation to the circular economy, to learn about solutions. You can replicate some of the same process by reading introductory books about climate solutions, such as Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving our Climate Crisis Now or Project Drawdown. (The Climate Drift program goes deeper, walking through the current business challenges that particular solutions face.) Olafson was drawn to solutions related to the food system and agriculture.

When a specific solution feels like a fit, Morawec recommends also thinking about how the day-to-day work might look—what type of customers you would interact with, for example. If you’re excited about the prospect of working in the area, the next step is to go deeper.

2. Dive deeper

In the accelerator, classes walk through a range of solutions and then bring in experts from companies leading in the space—for example, a manager working on circular economy solutions for Ikea. The business leaders talk about the biggest challenges they’re facing. “They’re telling us what’s keeping them up at night,” says Morawec.

It’s possible to learn about the same challenges by digging into research online and through podcasts. If you’re interested in energy, for example, one place to start could be the podcast Volts. Olafson became particularly interested in enteric methane—the potent greenhouse gas emitted in cow burps—after listening to an episode of the Catalyst podcast about the impact of methane.

If you’re interested in rooftop solar power and live in California, meanwhile, you might learn that installations steeply dropped after a change in regulations meant that homeowners could no longer earn as much for the energy that their rooftop installation generates. Then you can start to explore solutions—in the solar example, some companies are trying to convince customers to also invest in batteries, so they can make better use of their extra power. That introduces new challenges, like finding ways for homeowners to finance the upfront cost of both solar and a battery, and how to effectively communicate the economic advantages.

3. Brainstorm your own solutions

When you have a grasp of the problem and how some companies in the space are addressing it, think about how you’d approach it yourself. If you’re a marketing director interested in California’s solar challenge, you might think about how messaging about batteries (or the idea of virtual power plants) can be easier to understand. Think about what you’ve learned from projects at previous jobs and how those insights could be useful for the new problem.

When Olafson dove into research about enteric methane, he wrote an overview of how technology could address the problem, highlighting some of the gaps that he could potentially work on (for example, online education to help farmers understand solutions).

4. Share your ideas

As Olafson reached out to companies working on enteric methane for informational interviews, he continued to brainstorm solutions. He learned that research in the space was often duplicated; and in one conversation, he talked with a company about the need for a database of current research. The manager he spoke with told him about a paper that summarized 87 studies. That weekend, Olafson quickly downloaded the data from the paper into Airtable and created a visualization, showcasing how his tech skills could help with a practical problem. The company ended up hiring him, even though they hadn’t listed a job.

It’s this kind of proactive approach that works, says Morawec, rather than networking with someone and telling them how passionate you are about working on climate. “You need to understand the actual challenge that this company is facing today,” he says. “Then you can say, ‘Okay, how do my skills actually apply to that? How would I solve that?’ Then you can start drawing from your experience and from your transferable skills. Without understanding that, you’re going to have really unsuccessful networking calls.”

In the Climate Drift program, participants can share their ideas with the network of executives who are part of the program, and can also publish posts on Climate Drift’s site. Others might share posts on LinkedIn. It’s possible, Morawec says, to begin to get companies approaching you rather than the other way around. As with most job searching now, just responding to job listings isn’t likely to be as successful as networking—as long as that networking happens in the right way.

“You’ve got to be involved and an active partner,” Olafson says. “No one is going to hand you a job in climate. You have to make sure that you’re providing a perspective so that they see your value and and why you might be an impactful part of their team.” He’s hoping that many more people can make the switch. “I think that there are lots of folks out there that really are stuck in jobs that they don’t enjoy,” he says. “For what it’s worth, I would say that grass is greener over here, and it is worth coming over.”