In search of competence
During the last decade we’ve seen an increasing trend in the importance and seniority of sustainability roles in the corporate world. The Green Edge takes a closer look.
If you’re a corporate recruiter struggling to find a suitably-qualified candidate for your new Sustainability Manager role, you might think about getting help from a firm like Weinreb Group1. This well-respected and pioneering sustainability recruitment firm has charted what it calls ‘the rise of ESG [Environmental, Social and Governance, as if you didn’t know] in the C-suite’ since 2011 and reports that, as of March 2021, 95 publicly-traded corporations in the US have a ‘Chief Sustainability Officer [CSO]’ as their senior sustainability person.
In the UK, we see many sustainability jobs being advertised, both at senior and more junior levels. When we last looked, there were something like 5,000 sustainability management jobs being advertised in the UK on LinkedIn, of which around 150 were CSO roles. So, while the job boards recognise a fairly well-established set of ESG occupations, it’s taking time for the official occupational datasets to catch up. Just being nerdy for a moment, we observe that while the US standard occupational classification (SOC) recognises both Chief Sustainability Officer and Sustainability Specialist as occupations, the most recent UK SOC (2020) bundles roles like this into ‘Environmental professionals’. ESG and its growing value – not least to the delivery of the ambitions of the COP process - is more than these titles imply, we feel.
So, Mr/Mrs/Mx Corporate Recruiter, how would you go about writing a job spec for your company’s aspirational new-hire Sustainability Manager? Well, you could of course look at some of the job postings out there in cyberspace and do a cut-and-paste job on the myriad content contained within. If you have a tame IT techie (or money to spend with Lightcast) on hand, you could even commission a bit of job-board scraping. Or you could take a look at the public databases to see what is contained therein. We are, of course, referring to the US Occupational Network (O*NET) and the European Skills, Competences and Occupations (ESCO) datasets. Perhaps a glance at ISCO-08 too, which it could be argued needs a little updating by now.
The most important thing in terms of your circle of competence is not how large the area of it is, but how well you’ve defined the perimeter.
Warren Buffett
Let’s cut to the chase: we’re not going to spend the rest of this post banging on about skills, knowledge, behaviours and all that other educational stuff. Instead, we’re asking this: in what does a Sustainability Manager need to be competent? According to ESCO, competence is ‘the application of knowledge and skills in a partly unpredictable setting where technical and organisational problems occur on a daily basis and where solutions have to be immediately identified and applied.’ That works for us.
So, we approach ESCO with enthusiasm, confident of finding a definitive set of competences that we can lift and plonk straight in our Sustainability Manager job description. Which we do – but only to a point. Slightly frustratingly (and we’ve commented on this before), ESCO lays out the distinction between skills and competences but then conflates the two into a single list. But, hey ho, we said we’re not going to bang on too much about this, so here’s the set of essential whatevers that ESCO gives us for Sustainability Managers2:
Source: ESCO
And this seems to us to be a pretty good starting point. Moreover, ESCO goes on to provide a drilldown description for each element, showing which ones apply across sectors (e.g. qualitative research), are more sector-specific (e.g. sustainable finance), or are specific to each appointment (e.g. evaluate company needs). Some elements trace back to transversal skills, such as promoting environmental awareness, grouped under life skills and competences.
What ESCO doesn’t tell us, though, is the relative importance of each of these elements. Certainly, relative importances will vary from job to job, but what’s the general spread? Here, we can cast an eye over O*NET and its CSO profile, which we usually find contains a decently-comprehensive task list for each occupation, together with importance scores for each task. Bearing in mind that O*NET is compiled through ongoing surveys of job incumbents and occupational experts, rather than ESCO’s desk work on National Occupational Standards, we feel we can use O*NET’s rankings with a fair amount of confidence.
The only problem here, though, is that O*NET doesn’t recognise competences. It does, however, contain a rather useful aggregation of tasks into what it calls work activities (WA). There are three levels of this task-to-activity aggregation – detailed (DWA), intermediate (IWA) and general (GWA) – and we know of a few projects in the US that have roughly equated IWAs to competences. So let’s look at those. Here are O*NETs ‘competence’ scores for a CSO – click on the image to see the underlying dashboard that we built to accompany this post:
So, developing and implementing sustainable policies, procedures, processes and practices, and being the ESG lynchpin between your company, its people and society are all writ large for a CSO / Sustainability Manager. Guess we could have figured that out for ourselves, but it’s always good to see these things in black and white. Well, black and green if you’re reading this post in our Substack web page.
Back to ESCO and here we find many of O*NET’s elements being pulled together into an occupational definition for Sustainability Managers. O*NET isn’t quite so good at occupational definitions like this, we note:
Sustainability managers are responsible for ensuring the sustainability of business processes. They provide assistance in the design and implementation of plans and measures to ensure that the manufacturing processes and products comply with given environmental regulations and social responsibility standards and they monitor and report on the implementation of sustainability strategies within the company supply chain and business process. They analyse issues linked to manufacturing processes, use of materials, waste reduction, energy efficiency and products traceability to improve environmental and social impacts and integrate sustainability aspects into the company culture.
Source: ESCO
So, with a little manipulation and fiddling, we feel we’ve got most of the basic ingredients for our Sustainability Manager job spec. A little caveat here though: we don’t claim to be HR or job design experts. But we have worked a fair bit in this space and at least feel qualified to offer this long list as our starter for ten (click on image to show in PDF format):
One attribute we haven’t included though. While not necessarily needing to be as thick-skinned as Matt Hancock, we feel Sustainability Managers do need a certain degree of resilience to weather the pushbacks, steer away from the ludditism, educate out the scepticism and cynicism, and – ideally – see the job out to retirement or 2050, whichever comes first.
Look out for a future post where we’ll explore the entry routes into sustainability careers in a little more detail.
Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell ’em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then get busy and find out how to do it
Theodore Roosevelt
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We are aware that ESCO also defines a Corporate Social Responsibility Manager role, which we could have used for this post. But while the CSRM has been around in ESCO since its first release, we felt the newer Sustainability Manager role might be a better match the O*NET CSO role. ESCO’s new O*NET crosswalk also matches these two roles.