Sustainability specialist skills for your resume and career

In sustainability fields, communication skills (writing, speaking, meeting facilitation, and telling the story of sustainability) are critical. Sustainability professionals who work within organizations (universities, healthcare, municipal govt, etc.) find ourselves regularly needing to convince our colleagues that it's worth their time to do the "extra" sustainability thing. This entails building relationships of trust (having integrity and following through on what you SAY you're going to deliver), effectively communicating the benefits to them and their team, and knowing just how hard to push or advocate for a strategy or change. Change can take a while, so it's important to meet others in terms of sustainability, literacy, and openness and convince them that they stand to benefit in all sorts of ways if they collaborate w/ the sustainability staff.

Sustainability professionals find themselves doing a TON of tracking and data collection, both qualitative and quantitative. Survey design and administration, greenhouse gas emissions accounting, effective marketing, and social media strategy, basic calculations of ROI (return on investment)...all of these things are really helpful and skills I use almost daily.

Using the word maximize is a bit tricky, right? A maximum to some can mean wealth creation, yet for some tradeoffs, and minimizing other things. A traditional approach would probably sound like this, look for big companies with good salaries and goals for being more sustainable that align with your degree and interests, but do not compromise by taking the first job that get an offer for. Decades ago, this could get you into a stable company where you can look for innovative projects, do interesting work, and work your way up. More and more graduates and job seekers I talk to today, see the gig economy, constant change, and people not wanting to be in the same company of same job for decades, as providing a different approach to maximizing your potential. I have purposefully left the word salary out here. Think about it this way, what are you doing today that will payoff a decade from now? The payoffs are more than a short-term focus on a paycheck. Why not try to maximize happiness. With this view of the long-term, I try to advise those starting in the field in this way, do not take a fifty-year-old US centric approach, i.e., "where you live to work". Instead "work to live" and fully explore the value of a career doing meaningful work integrating sustainability into products and systems in a way that excites you, with a balanced approach to life, time working in the office or at home, family options, family support, gender equality in pay, and the importance of being connected to networks of engaged agents of change making a difference in the world. This network and the kind of work you choose to do, can be a goal to maximize with payoffs for decades to come. Work for good companies really pushing the envelope for more sustainable business practices.