Building the door for opportunity to knock
For people looking for a sustainability career, there’s plenty of advice out there but no one-stop-shop approach. The Green Edge goes in through the looking glass.
As we’ve reported in previous posts, there are no clear or fixed pathways into a sustainability career. For student channels, there are of course the ES3 (Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences and Environmental Studies) programmes, while in more general terms, resources like ESCO and O*NET list the knowledge, skills and competences that may be acquired in a more cherry-pickable way through cross-skilling or upskilling. But, in general terms, what golden nuggets of advice would one give to a sustainability-conscious young (or even older) person hell-bent on (re-)shaping a career around the most important issue of our day?
We could start with a piece of advice from Nahia Orduña, a data and AI specialist who has written on subjects as wide-ranging as building personal brands, diversity in tech and democratisation of skills in the post-pandemic world. Nahia highlights four areas to work on: educate yourself on the three pillars of sustainability; identify your area of expertise; upskill; and apply to the right companies. All good advice, we think1. So let’s consider each of these a little further.
Image: TGE from UN and others
Knowledge of the three pillars, seventeen goals and everything that goes round them is one thing, but we’d also add to that the personal – some would say ‘transversal’ – qualities to apply that knowledge in the context of any given role. To own the narrative and to articulate, communicate and engage; to number crunch the values of one approach over another; to show pragmatism; patience and perseverance. To name but a few. As we’ve seen in uncomfortable detail recently, when other priorities are pressing grand ideas of sustainability may get forgotten. You have to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Next, areas of expertise. Everyone has different capacities and attributes, of course, but we’ve always thought hat seems to be the currently norm of categorising knowledge, skills and behaviours – not to mention the occasional confusion between skills and competences – to be somewhat of an oversimplification. In our humble opinion, the US O*NET database makes a nice distinction between interests (‘preferences for work environments and outcomes’), abilities (‘enduring attributes of the individual that influence performance’), basic skills (‘developed capacities that facilitate learning or the more rapid acquisition of knowledge’), and cross-functional skills (‘developed capacities that facilitate performance of activities that occur across jobs’). For some elements like mathematics, it even distinguishes between knowledge (‘arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, statistics, and their applications’) and skill (‘using mathematics to solve problems’). O*NET adds other personal characteristics too, like work values and work styles – all good factors to take into account when considering one’s particular career path in sustainability, or any other career path for that matter.
Image: TGE from ESCO green skills collection
Third, upskilling, and this is critical. According to UNIDO, there are four categories of so-called ‘green skills’: engineering and technical; science; operation management; and monitoring. But, while these are high level, there are plenty more detailed listings in taxonomies like ESCO. One of our favourite new green careers sites, IMEA’s Green Careers Hub, is collating key jobs and skills for the UK green economy, and here is our (non-definitive) cross-reference between some of the skills areas found there and those seen in the ESCO data:
Image: TGE from IMEA Green Careers and ESCO (click to download as PDF)
And finally, apply to the right companies. You might try a B Corp, of course, or aim for a corporate sustainability role in any number of ‘regular’ companies. You may become a devotee of a specific area of sustainability – like circularity – and try to find a role within a firm that’s implementing one or more of the business models shown in this rather neat graphic from Canada:
Image: @WRWCanada
In terms of sectors, you might opt for private, public or not-for-profit. In the private sector, you may be looking at key subsectors like agriculture, fisheries, forestry, manufacturing, renewable energy and tourism. Or perhaps construction, where companies like Laing O'Rourke offer graduate development programmes for many flavours of graduates, including entry-level roles in environmental sustainability, social value, supply chain sustainability, and whole-life carbon engineering.
In the public sector, you might see opportunities at national level and - increasingly - city region/combined authority and local authority levels. In addition, many partnerships are bringing local bodies together, such as the Northern Powerhouse Partnership or those forming around the new freeports. Roles here might range from policy analysis to urban planning, or into the communities themselves, perhaps engaging with householders in the major task of domestic retrofit.
Finally, in the not-for-profit sector, the range of organisations is huge, from housing associations to research centres, from think-tanks to advocacy groups. Here, you might need a deeper specialism - data analysis, visualisation, plastics, biofuels, the list goes on and on.
Bottom line: if you’re looking for a career in sustainability, build the door for opportunity to knock. If you do, within the limits of supply and demand the sustainability careers world could be your oyster. Make of it what you can. We leave you with another nice graphic we found, showing a few potential opportunities in Spain…
Image: Iberdrola
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We would suggest you may also like to think in terms of four pillars of sustainability – social, environmental, economic and human capital – as described in this rather good article from FutureLearn.