growing our own food is trendy. If you expect to be an expert, you will be waiting a long time – instead, get stuck in and remember that what is considered best practice today may not be tomorrow. Be prepared to keep learning and asking questions.3 Think about becoming a trustee of a not‐for‐profit organisation connected to your area of interest. Increasingly NGOs are looking for young people to join their Boards and seeking trustees from different industry backgrounds. This is a fantastic way to learn, contribute, get noticed and stay motivated.
4 Make the most of our interconnected and virtual world to find people who can share tips, ideas and experiences. Most people who are further on in their careers are happy to share their stories with people starting out or looking for a career transition. Networking can open doors and no longer needs to be face‐to‐face.
5 A career in the environmental sector can be tough at times; after all, despite great wins we are still losing the battle. It is okay to feel frustrated and sad. Make a plan to support your own resilience – being outside in nature is a great reminder of why we do what we do (and not all environmental jobs are outside, in fact many of them are desk based), find yourself a support network or an ‘environmentally friendly’ coach to keep buoyant. Follow your passions and never doubt that what you're doing is important.
Personal Profile
Zoe Greenwood co‐leads the Environment, Climate and Conservation practice area for Oxford HR, an executive search firm who find and support world changing leaders. She is also a founding member of the Climate Change Coaches. Before this, Zoe spent 15 years working for NGOs.
After completing her degree (not related at all to the environment!), she travelled to Hong Kong and Indonesia and supported the delivery of environmental education programmes in schools. She went on to run the Press Office for Earthwatch before retraining as a coach and joining the Learning and Development team, working with multinational companies to deliver sustainability leadership journeys. These roles took her all over the world – witnessing the natural wonders of our planet and the scale of degradation.
Source: Zoe Greenwood, Oxford HR Consultant and Climate Change Coach, UK. www.linkedin.com/in/zoegreenwood. © John Wiley & Sons.
Personal Profile
Shannon Houde, Career, Executive, and EI Coach, Walk of Life Coaching, UK/USA
I’ve been an eco‐entrepreneur, a management consultant, an MBA student, and a multi‐lingual traveller. My 20‐year career story has been one of constant reinventions, so I know first‐hand how to help others make their career‐change dreams a reality. I chose to create my dream job in career coaching to combine my diverse experience as a hiring manager, business coach, Corporate Responsibility management consultant, and corporate recruiter.
I coach leaders to shift their mindsets about what is possible across three stages of their careers: finding purpose, growing influence and delivering impact. I provide emotional intelligence coaching and design team coaching courses around diversity, equity and inclusion. I have coached more than 1000 clients in more than 40 countries and I love helping people and organisations achieve their potential for impact by connecting to their purpose.
It wasn’t until I founded Walk of Life Coaching that I realised I had discovered my true calling. At the intersection of recruitment, matchmaking, personal branding, thought leadership and responsible business, I found my sweet spot where I get the right people into the right roles to create a more sustainable world.
Top Tips
Get the lay of the land. The purpose‐driven economy is forever evolving and the jobs market right along with it. Make it your business to read and research as much as you can about the work you hope to do and the players in that space. Cultivate a deep understanding of the issues at play, because environmental work is increasingly nuanced and sophisticated.
Identify your values and traits. Zero in on what guides how you behave and what has shaped your life. This will help inform the language you use in composing your personal brand and how you develop a compelling narrative about who you are and why you are valuable to potential employers. It will also help you to align your core values to the types of organisations you pursue for employment and to determine what attributes of an employer and position are non‐negotiable for you.
Identify your superpower. There are few direct paths to green careers. Many leaders in this space started out in roles that had nothing to do with it – such as in engineering, marketing, or operations, among others. Before you determine which route to take, you should identify your ‘superpower’ skills, which can help set you apart. This can be anything from strategy to communication to project management to programming.
Talk about your accomplishments, not your past positions. Providing a laundry list of your previous roles and employers may seem like the default approach in job applications, but it’s not especially useful to hiring managers. Instead of framing things in terms of what you were tasked with doing, present your background in terms of what you did do and what impact it had. Talk about the results you have delivered in concrete terms. Did you help remediate former brownfields? Secure funding for a habitat protection project? Develop a software that monitors the migration of ocean debris? These are the types of details that really communicate what you have to offer.
Cultivate your emotional intelligence. Effective sustainability leaders align their intellectual intelligence with their emotional intelligence, and organisations are waking up to that fact. Just look at all the mindfulness courses that major companies like Google are offering their employees. They understand the importance of being able to keep your ego in check and empathise with other people, especially when things are fraught, and solutions seem hard to find. Emotional intelligence is also connected to the ability to coordinate with others and manage teams of people, which are crucial skills when working towards an environmental mission.
Shannon Houde is an ICF‐certified career and executive coach who founded Walk of Life Coaching, the first international career coaching and professional development advisory business focused solely on the social impact, environmental, CSR, and sustainable business fields. Get in touch to join our wider network or to book a coaching session.
Source: Shannon Houde, Career, Executive, and EI Coach, Walk of Life Coaching, UK/USA. www.walkoflifecoaching.com. © John Wiley & Sons.
Personal Profile
Catriona Horey, Leadership & Life Coach and Nature & Climate Change Coach, UK
I grew up gently immersed in the environmental world. My father, Geoffrey Matthews, was one of the founding fathers of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands and spent more than 30 years as Director of Research and Conservation at WWT (Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust), headquartered in Slimbridge, where he worked closely alongside Sir Peter Scott. My mother, Mary Matthews (née Evans), also worked at WWT, conducting research into swan behaviour over a decade.
I grew up in the Gloucestershire countryside and, as a child and teenager, would write letters to MPs about environmental issues, was a member of green charities and raised money for environmental initiatives.
My interest in the environment continued into my late teens and early 20s. I collected data for a GTZ project on fire management and prevention in the grasslands
