Professional and Personal skills development.
In 2022, sustainability leaders need to have honed their soft skills like communication and collaboration, engaging and mobilising all manner of internal and external stakeholders. So, do you still need an environment-related degree to become a sustainability professional?
This is the second part of a two-part feature on the evolution of sustainability skills, written as part of edie’s Business Leadership Month. The first part of the feature, which can be found here, outlines why soft skills may be even more important for sustainability professionals than technical expertise.
As the experts have outlined, the sustainability leader of the 2020s is both a master strategy developer and a unifying force for strategy delivery – and strategy delivery necessitates influencing and engaging; change management and collaboration; problem-solving and course-correcting.
It is unlikely that you would find classes on these skills, specifically, on the syllabus for degrees like geography, ecology, geology or atmospheric science.
Yet, according to IEMA’s Baxter, more than 90% of the organisation’s members globally are university-educated. And more than 50% of IEMA members have gone beyond gaining an undergraduate degree and also have a master’s degree and/or a Doctorate degree.
Baxter notes that, around a decade ago, many professionals will have sought multiple environment-related degrees. More recently, he has noticed a trend towards “blending” environment-related degrees with those related to business and finance. The soft skills provided by business qualifications, he argues, can be “combined with focused knowledge and rapidly make someone quite effective in driving change” within an organisation. Read more…