Career in Sustainability: Skills, ESG Roles, AI Impact and How to Become a Sustainability Manager

When you hear the term sustainability, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? global warming, planting trees, saving water, green energy but don’t get surprised if I tell you that most of the sustainability tasks in major firms start with data and are still driven by excel sheets followed by knowledge and Intelligence and ultimately a solid decision making.

This blog, inspired by an insightful podcast featuring host Amit Morya and Saurabh Gaidhani, who transitioned from being an architect to an urban planner and then to a corporate sustainability position, will address many questions about sustainability roles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgTtCYDZhE0&t=924s

What Sustainability Managers Actually Do?

Let’s start with the basics. For someone who is looking for a sustainability role; Saurabh Gaidhani talks about two basic things to test. 

1. Subject Matter Expertise bases the experience

2. Passion about the environment, earth and related fields.

Once you get the job it doesn’t start with talking to NGOs, CEOs about investment but simple technicalities of Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions data in an excel sheet and analysis, and no need to say; AI is definitely going to help you in this analysis.

Over time you become more experienced and start understanding it a bit better. You realize that there are multiple facets of sustainability. Sustainability at energy transition is different from circular economy and human health and wellbeing and perhaps carbon credits so it is important to realize which part of the world (and sustainability) you want to join before you take a plunge in this area.

As the candidate gains more and more experience, the role is not linear and not limited to one side. It becomes truly cross functional and you have multiple internal and external stakeholders from supply chain director to procurement and investor and you have to put ESG and related angles at every point speaking the business language which everyone understands. Talk about parameters which matter to them like profitability, adherence to regulatory framework, and relevance in the business is more influencing.

As AI is the flavor of the season, sustainability is one of those niche roles where AI is creating an unprecedented boom for the new roles. Training large language models consumes massive energy, yet all these tech giants need to meet their net zero targets. Apart from this, increasing regulatory and reporting challenges around sustainability will need more experts as only Computers can’t do everything and this industry will need human brains to connect the dots.

This will also result in the development of an ecosystem and a cycle centered around data centers, energy demands, Net-zero targets, sustainability requirements, emission reduction, and data analysis, which in turn leads to more data centers ☺

Key take away:

1. Understanding grassroots issues, especially related to urban planning or human behavior, the East is different from the West due to population density and culture, and the same concepts don’t apply very well.

   
   

2. You need to make decisions based on the future and not solely driven by only money. Human lives matter

   
   

3. Along with the corporate jobs, family offices provide a very good career growth based on trust, relationships and long term association.

   
   

4. AI is going to create more demands for energy leading to interesting roles in sustainability.

   
   

5. Sustainability roles has the potential to provide long term sustainable job aspects ☺