Nate Springer recently landed a job in Advisory Services at BSR. I sat down with Nate to get his perspective as a sustainability jobseeker who finally landed his dream job.
In your experience as a recent job seeker who found a great sustainability position with BSR, how would you categorize the current opportunities?
The market is both exciting and daunting. It’s exciting to see tremendous growth and uptake of sustainability across so many industries and companies. BSR’s growth reflects this (we have a number of openings today).
It’s also daunting because it’s moving so fast that it’s hard to see where it’s going. Post-MBA opportunities exist but a specialization or niche is tremendously helpful. This is where I see growing fields of specialization with available jobs:
- Enterprise sustainability management
- Supply chain sustainability
- Employee engagement
- Reporting and communications
- Stakeholder engagement
I suggest that current graduate students interested in sustainability find ways to get experience that would contribute to the needs of these specific sustainability functions.
That’s always easier said than done. How are you seeing job seekers getting relevant experience?
It’s a great question, and that may be the single hardest part of the job search. Several of my sustainability colleagues got their start with the EDF Climate Corps program as graduate students. I’m a big fan of the program because the interns get hands-on in-house energy-efficiency project analysis and planning experience.
The sustainability managers and directors I know are managing energy-efficiency or carbon-, waste-, or water-reduction projects. Many are using enterprise sustainability management software vendors to improve the reliability and ease of data collection to set, track, and meet sustainability targets. The specific skills Climate Corps provides are immediately relevant for those needs.
You found different ways to get your experience. Can you talk a little bit about that?
I was fortunate and strategic to enroll in Michigan’s Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise dual MBA/MS program several years ago when I decided to move into the field. The great thing about the program -- and, I believe, a number of our sister programs at Duke, Yale, and Stanford -- is a strong hands-on component. I took an internship with a cleantech accelerator, then another with Dow Chemical Company’s sustainability department.
Next page: Experience trumps passion
![Ending the alphabet soup in the [insert word here] field](http://www.greenbiz.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/wide_small/130516-voien1-w.jpg "Ending the alphabet soup in the [insert word here] field")
@Sean T - First, the author
@Sean T - First, the author does not imply at all that you need an MBA to land the jobs listed in the article or your dream job in general. In fact, this "article" is an interview and the author doesn't even include any of her own words in the piece. Obviously you didn't read the article or you would have noticed all the responses were by Nate Springer, the person being interviewed.
Secondly, many "top companies" prefer or require an MBA for these positions, especially if it's a consulting job. At the end of the day, it really depends on the job, the company, and so many other variables, but what Nate is saying is that an MBA combined with specialized experience can help differentiate yourself from others.
I finished my MBA last December, but it wasn't my MBA that got me my "dream job" in sustainability. During my MBA, I landed an internship doing what I wanted to do (managing enterprise environmental management systems). When I interviewed for with my current employer they asked me about my internship, hardly about my MBA. But the point is I would have never gotten my internship, if I weren't in an MBA program. This is a very good article and I agree with Nate. Finding a specialization and getting experience is key. The experience will get your the interview or the job, the MBA will help with getting the salary you deserve. My two cents.
Excellent article. Keep
Excellent article. Keep posting such kind of
info on your page. Im really impressed by it.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on sperm. Regards
plenty of competent,
plenty of competent, qualified people dont need MBAs to carry out these very same tasks. shame on the author for propagating that myth.
Great article! I just
Great article! I just graduated from my MBA and started a full-time job in clean tech marketing with a group of 5 other recent MBAs. We all came from diverse pre-MBA jobs, but two did EDF Climate Corps internships, one did a summer at a utility and another worked in energy consulting. There are a lot of ways to get experinece in the field, but the importance of internships, staying up to date on the latest in a fast-moving fields, writing, reading and attending conferences can't be underestimated.