The impact investing industry is constantly evolving. In light of the changing political environment and macroeconomic shifts, some asset owners and managers see an even greater need to generate social or environmental benefits through investing, while others move away from the strategy.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the sustainable and impact investing job market is shrinking, as major banks, asset managers and consulting firms make headlines with layoffs of staff focused on impact and sustainability. In the last 18 months alone, Barclays, Wells Fargo, Standard Chartered, HSBC, and Citi have laid off staff supporting ESG and impact investing strategies.
However, we are not aware of any quantitative or systematic investigation of how the labor market in this area has changed.
Drawing from large employment datasets described in a recent working paper, our team from Harvard Business School’s Project on Impact Investments investigated how the size and state of the impact investing job market changed between May 2024 and May 2025.
We focused on 40 leading asset managers, investment banks and management consulting firms, including Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company, BlackRock and others. Our research found that the labor market in impact investing remained resilient during that time period, with a relatively modest contraction of approximately 2.2% (3,620 to 3,540), despite political headwinds and an apparent corporate retreat from impact and sustainability.
While the number of impact roles declined by 2.2%, our estimates suggest that the number of total jobs at the 40 firms – including both traditional and impact investing roles – grew by 2.25% during the same time period, from 1.62 million to 1.66 million jobs.
Sizing up the market
Our team first identified 40 firms to study based on a combination of AUM, annual revenue and reputation. We then analyzed the roles and responsibilities of the approximately 1.6 million people employed at these firms in May 2024, identifying jobs related to sustainability and impact. Finally, we studied how the composition of employment had changed by May 2025, whether through natural attrition or layoffs.
For both May 2024 and May 2025 we pulled a representative sample of the entire dataset and then carefully parsed the job data to identify roles related to impact investing and sustainable finance.
We also created two job categories based on a database of keywords: Social Impact (e.g. roles focused on social impact or economic development) and Environmental/Climate (e.g. roles focused on sustainability, climate, clean energy or ESG). While ESG includes social and governance issues, we chose to categorize ESG roles as Environmental/Climate as most ESG roles in our dataset were focused on environmental issues.
The state of impact investing jobs
Here are the key takeaways from our study for those who wish to better understand the state of the impact investing labor market:
- The number of jobs in the Environmental/Climate category at the 40 firms declined by just 2.92%, perhaps lower than the wholesale retreat some may have expected due to recent political pressure against ESG. Even as some firms removed ESG roles, the broader market remained relatively fixed.
- Limited job data suggests the number of jobs in the Social Impact category grew between May 2024 and May 2025. A key trend was an uptick in roles focused on philanthropy, social impact and inclusion.
- The top three firms by aggregate job count were JPMorganChase, Bank of America, and CitiGroup. These firms also employed the largest number of Environmental/Climate jobs of the firms we analyzed.
- The firms that exhibited the greatest change in total job count, both traditional and impact jobs, were Credit Suisse (-23.4%), Evercore (+23.2%), Amundi (-23.3%), Moelis & Company (+21.2%) and Bain Capital (-13.7%).
- The firms that showed the greatest change in total job count within the Environmental/Climate category were Northern Trust, Jefferies, Goldman Sachs, UBS and JP MorganChase, though each firm had a total headcount change of fewer than 100 jobs.
We note several caveats to our analysis. First, using a 5% representative sample of a large dataset may reduce the precision of our estimates, especially for firm-specific numbers. Second, there is some anecdotal evidence of firms relabeling jobs, even though the job roles did not meaningfully change (e.g., renaming an “ESG Analyst” position as “Analyst”). Our approach would count that as a loss of a sustainable or impact job. Third, this analysis focuses on 40 institutional firms. There are a large number of smaller impact investing firms that are not captured in this analysis. Finally, we recognize that this data does not capture the last six months of market activity, and we may see further adjustments.
Looking ahead
Our study suggests that while the impact investing market has responded to recent changes in the policy and political environment, firms have remained committed to fully staffing their impact investing and ESG practices. We will continue to monitor and report on changes in employment in these areas.
Shawn Cole is a professor at Harvard Business School, where he leads the Project on Impact Investments alongside research manager Jonah Zahnd and research associate Anushka Kataruka.
Guest posts on ImpactAlpha represent the opinions of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of ImpactAlpha.
