Ruth shares her experience as a young professional navigating the green job industry. She finds that, while the sector offers specialised roles, generalists with multidisciplinary skills can excel by connecting diverse fields.
Ruth highlights that tackling complex challenges like climate change requires a holistic, cross-sector approach, making breadth an advantage in the green economy.
Finishing a degree in earth and environmental sciences can leave you feeling like you haven’t left a single stone unturned.
I remember days where I would go from a lecture learning about the rotation of a fly’s wings, to another counting prehistoric pollen (did dinosaurs sneeze?). One minute I would be outside finding bat roosts, the next mapping landslides in a computer lab. I’d get home, and my friends in geology modules had been licking rocks.
It was a wonderful time, and I stand by earth-related subjects as being incredibly worthwhile and valuable career choices. However, with no real bounds and a literally global breadth, graduating into the green sector can be pretty tricky indeed.
Suddenly, you are plunged into a world of two-word job titles. You find yourself being asked, “So what do you do?” with a mere 5 seconds to answer. It’s a shock to the system and one I certainly wasn’t prepared for.
In this article, I will take a ‘1-year-post-grad’ look at the green job industry. I’ll explore if there is room for generalists and consider why breadth could actually be a huge advantage.
The green job industry: an overview
The green job industry is huge, with opportunities in many different sub-sectors. You could work in the government or public sector, for NGOs and charities, or shiny ‘green-tech’ start-ups.
Perhaps you take a curiosity to corporate sustainability, research and academia, agriculture, or the oddly named ‘green finance’. There’s a sub-sector and consequent world of highly specialised careers for everyone.
Why generalists may have an edge
So, with all these potential career paths and a myriad of open doors, grads with breadth should settle in and ‘focus’, right?
Perhaps not.
While these sub-sectors and the traditional careers they contain are great to be aware of (and crucial to consider in the great post-uni job hunt), my year spent in a ‘green-tech’ startup has taught me something I hadn’t expected.
That, in the face of a challenge as holistic as the climate crisis, fitting into a sub-sector may not be as important as I once thought. My days of jumping between fields of study may actually prove quite handy indeed.
As a research analyst, I spend a lot of time looking at market trends, either in the context of governmental regulatory development or the strategies being employed by businesses across the globe.
The rise of multi-sector solutions: carbon and biodiversity offsetting
So let’s consider for a moment, a recent trend that has caught my eye – carbon and biodiversity offsetting. No, not due to its controversy and hotly debated efficacy, but rather its unwavering applicability and astounding presence weaved into nearly all green industry sub-sectors.
Love it or hate it, you’ll likely come across it. Whether drafting policy or designing sustainability reports, someone is going to mention offsetting. Step outside to survey some birds, or gather a team of mycorrhizae researchers, and you might find yourself on a site being developed for offsetting.
But this article isn’t about offsetting, it’s about the green industry and the jobs that many like myself may come across in our first few years post-uni. So why do I think it’s relevant here?
Well, because offsetting is an example of a topic that, due to its presence in all sub-sectors, ultimately requires a multi-sector approach, and I believe many more ideas of the future will be just the same.
The need for multidisciplinary skills in tackling global challenges
The climate crisis is global, complex, and interdependent. Solutions are going to demand a multi-sector approach. Not only will we need specialists who have gone deep into their fields, but also generalists—those who have embraced their breadth and developed diverse, multidisciplinary skills.
These skills include synthesising knowledge from diverse areas, translating ideas, applying systems thinking, cross-department collaboration, and seeing the bigger picture.
Skills like these help connect the dots between seemingly unrelated sectors. They drive progress and change, and green-sector grads are well prepared to excel in them.
A future of boundary-crossing green careers?
So, is there a future of green careers that cross sub-sector boundaries? Could we one day see direct communication channels between departments as diverse and seemingly at odds as finance and conservation?
I can’t say for sure, but what I can say is it’s a great time to be a green-sector grad with a love of a little bit of everything. And perhaps finding a 5-second answer to “What do you do?” isn’t very important after all.
Tips for new green-sector grads (both specialists and generalists alike)
- Sign up to inbox newsletters like NatureTech Memos to get the bigger picture.
- Get active on LinkedIn and follow key companies and people from all sub-sectors.
- Recognise that you might not know what you’re looking for and that’s OK—many jobs have not yet established themselves. Prepare for the unknown, expect the unexpected!
- Did you know you can rock up at most industry webinars? They’re not VIP only!
- Stay informed on policy changes. Whether your ideal sector or not, many roles in the green sector will interact with policy.
- Understand that all experience is good experience. It may not be your dream role, but as we’ve shown here, breadth will do no harm!
