How to Start a Career in Sustainability ft. Lauren Scott (The Resilience Report)

[Host: Lauren Scott] Hi everyone.

On today's episode, I'm going to answer a question that I get quite often, which is how can you get into sustainability if you want to be part of the solution? 

I'm very lucky in that I get to mentor undergraduate business students here in Montreal, and one of the questions that I often get through this program as well as through LinkedIn is really this question of if they're just getting started and want to get some sustainability onto their CV, what is the best approach? 

I also get this question from professionals who are kind of mid-career, and are now trying to figure out “OK how do I become part of the solution?” I would say that there are two different approaches to this, and they’re the same 2 approaches that you would have for any career change, which is 1) building up your education and 2) building up your experience. 

On the first slide (on education), there's obviously the classic formal education that you can pursue and I'm very happy to say that this has come such a long way, even since I graduated 15 years ago. At the time, sustainability was maybe the last paragraph of your chapter, and it would just say “do all of these concepts and try not to be a bad person while doing it”. However, now beyond those kind of classic environmental science related degrees, there are also courses both at the undergraduate and the graduate level that allow you to weave in this concept of environmental and social impact into your degree of choice. So, whether you're in business or you're in medicine, there are courses and electives that you can take as part of this journey towards sustainability. 

But there's something else that we can consider now that is really gaining steam and something I'm a huge fan of, which is online, free education. This can take the form of YouTube videos or podcasts, but it can also be seen from higher educational institutions that are offering online certificates through platforms, one that I'm fan of is called edX, that really allow you to get a bit of experience through this studying and education and courses, and you'll have real tests and homework to make sure you're digesting it. But it allows you to gain access to this information that you might not already have. This democratization of education allows so many more people to get involved with sustainability, whether they have limited resources financially or limited resources in terms of time, because they're also trying to work full time or complete their studies. So, you can take these additional courses at your convenience to get that additional experience to get you into sustainability. 

That really deals with the education piece; on the other side, you have experience. So, this is always a chicken and the egg: you're applying for a job that asks you for experience, but then you need the job to get the experience. So how can you get access and exposure to those sustainability opportunities in your own way? So, there are two different angles here as well. The first would be to volunteer. I was working full time in marketing/communications and I knew that I wanted to get more into the ESG / sustainability side and I needed to better understand what that meant, especially here in the Canadian landscape. So, I started volunteering for an organization where I started at the committee level and then slowly worked my way up and then now I think six or seven years later, I'm now on actually the Board of Directors and have been able to gain access to the brilliant minds of those folks working at Sierra Club Canada Foundation, where I'm able to learn from them and I can also help lend my expertise from a marketing and communication standpoint. So, by volunteering you avoid a little bit of this pressure of having tons of experience before you can jump right in. You can start small, whether it is volunteering and you can even do weekend volunteering to see which organization you like, the folks who work there get a little bit of exposure and then you can increase, as you feel comfortable, your time dedicated to volunteering with them. 

The other angle, and I don't think this is something that recent graduates can know, is that most businesses are still very, very new to the sustainability game. And as a result, they maybe have one or two people within their organization who are dedicated towards sustainability, the rest are a bunch of colleagues who raise their hand and say, “hey, I would love to help you out. I'm very interested in this. Can I join a committee or kind of support you in any of your projects?” So, I would recommend that if you're getting started at a company or you're going through that interview process to ask the company or the employer if they have either Corporate Social Responsibility Committee or an ESG Committee and see is this something that's open to all employees. If it is, you can from day one throw your name in the hat and see if you can get involved. This will of course give you exposure not just to the sustainability practices of your business, but it's also going to be a great networking opportunity for you with those other individuals within the organization who are like-minded and who are really trying to be lighthouse leaders within their respective organization. 

So, this is just a quick episode to answer that question of how you can get involved in terms of sustainability, whether you're just starting your career or you're making a career change. And to those two pieces of educational and experience, I would say the last thing to really keep in mind and is something I've tried to keep in mind over the past 15 years, is to know that the area you're going to help the most is by seeing what your natural skill set is. So, if you are an ace at accounting and finance, or you're an amazing communicator, or you're an incredible artist, or you're passionate about product design, think about what you're really, really good at and see how you can apply a sustainability lens to that. So, is it applying for a company that works in the clean tech space and you can become part of the communications team? Or is it volunteering and helping close the books for a nonprofit who is trying to do their yearend financials and you can support them in that way? That's really where you're going to have the biggest impact, and this is especially true as you're just starting out and maybe you're volunteering and trying to do it on top of your already busy schedule. It's just going to come that much more naturally to you so that you can have a high impact without necessarily having to give a ton of time to be able to help that organization in question. 

I hope that helps and do let me know if you have any other questions that you would like me to address. Whether you're just starting your career or looking for a mid-career change in terms of how you can get involved in sustainability, if you do have any other questions, please let us know and I would be happy to get to them on a future episode.