Tucson’s sustainable and resilient economy presents a powerful opportunity to connect residents to quality careers while advancing the region’s climate, infrastructure, and economic development goals. In this report, we describe four key job families within Tucson’s sustainable and resilient sectors that strike a balance of accessibility, quality, career growth, and relevance to Tucson’s future economy and climate resilience goals.

Why This Matters

As the Tucson region makes investments to adapt to accelerating climate impacts and upgrade energy infrastructure, stakeholders across the city and county are seeking opportunities that align their climate and economic development goals and deliver high-quality jobs and meaningful opportunities for local businesses.

What We Found

Drawing on labor market data and stakeholder interviews, we identify four promising job families that offer accessible pathways into growing industries, many without requiring a bachelor’s degree: smart manufacturing, electrical trades, building efficiency, and land management. We highlight where demand for roles within these job families is strongest and where job quality and advancement opportunities are most promising. We also identify barriers that limit job opportunities in these sectors for underrepresented workers and put forward actionable strategies that workforce, education, industry, and community leaders can use to strengthen talent pipelines, improve job quality, and expand training opportunities.

Our key findings include the following:

• Four core job families—smart manufacturing, electrical, building efficiency, and land management—cut across Tucson’s sustainable and resilient economy, spanning multiple sectors and offering skills that are transferable across clean energy, infrastructure, and natural resource systems and the broader regional economy.
• Growth in these job families is strong but uneven, with rapid expansion in solar installation and smart manufacturing, while occupations like electrician and other supporting trades will generate the most openings and remain critical entry points.
• Inclusion barriers, shaped by occupational segregation, limit access to sustainability and resilience jobs, with women representing only 7 percent of workers in the four job families and Latino and Native American workers often concentrated in lower-wage, lower-quality roles (e.g., landscaping, roofing, solar installation).
• Many priority jobs balance accessibility and quality, offering wages from $25 to $30+ an hour with relatively short training requirements (often 4 to 18 months), creating viable on-ramps for workers with limited formal education to enter and advance in the labor market.
• Job quality differs within and across the four job families. For example, land management jobs tend to be of lower quality compared with smart manufacturing jobs. Within job families, entry-level trades and solar jobs offer lower wages and less stability, necessitating strategies to improve the quality of entry-level roles and clearly defined advancement pathways into higher-quality roles (such as industrial electrical repair, advanced manufacturing, or specialized efficiency work).
• Training systems are not fully aligned with evolving industry needs, with gaps reported in specialized and emerging skill areas (e.g., advanced HVAC, battery technologies, smart controls, energy auditing) and inconsistent integration of employer-based on-the-job training.

Harnessing the benefits of the sustainable and resilient economy for workers in the Tucson region will require a more coordinated, data-driven, and inclusive approach to workforce development that aligns training, education, and employer demand. The findings in this report point to a clear set of priorities: strengthening cross-sector partnerships to better align talent pipelines with evolving industry needs; examining where job quality can be improved at key steps along a career pathway; investing in short-term credentials, apprenticeships, and on-the-job training that enable workers to advance from entry-level roles into higher-quality careers; and improving access to timely, credible labor market information to guide decisionmaking.

At the same time, addressing persistent barriers to participation through wraparound supports, targeted outreach, and more inclusive program design will be critical to expanding the talent pool and ensuring the benefits of economic growth are broadly shared. Together, these strategies can help Tucson build an adaptive workforce system that supports both economic competitiveness and equitable access to opportunity in a rapidly changing labor market.

How We Did It

We designed a mixed-methods study to develop a framework for defining and assessing Tucson’s sustainable and resilient economy. For a detailed description of the analysis, please refer to the appendix in our companion report, Sustainable and Resilient Economic Development in Tucson, Arizona.