Sustainability Careers Are Hot. 8 Career Tips From Senior Executives At Dell, Salesforce, General Motors

If you work in sustainability, climate- or environment-related fields – or want to — your opportunities have expanded greatly, because climate change is (finally) a top priority. “For the first time ever, CEOs place environmental sustainability in their top 10 business priorities,” according to The 2022 Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey.

That means jobs in sustainability and environmental, social and governance (ESG) areas are on the rise, both in number and influence.

“Sustainability also appears as a competitive differentiator for CEOs in 2022 and 2023 – in fact, it is on the same level as brand trust among respondents,” according to the Gartner study announcement. It also found that, “Of the 80% of CEOs who intend to invest in new or improved products this year and next, environmental sustainability was cited as the third largest driver, just behind functional performance and general quality.”

So how do you seize these career opportunities?

Here are eight tips from C-level sustainability executives in three different industries who shared their advice with Electric Ladies Podcast recently: General Motors, Salesforce and Dell Technologies, especially for women:

1. Get in the game: Even if you’ve been out for a while, take the plunge to seek out these jobs again. “Your degree never expires, and what you learned and did in college, and then what the life experiences you’ve had since then are still very valuable. We maybe changed a system here or there, but physics is still physics,” Kristen Siemen, Chief Sustainability Officer of General Motors encouraged.

2. Let your passion inspire you to make things better: “You have to have passion about what you’re doing and, and where you’re working and, and who you’re working with, because you’re going to be your best,” Siemen added. “If you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you’re going to want to do more. You’re going to constantly be looking for opportunities to make things better…. and you’re going to be the person that they want on the team.”

3. Ask for the assignments and roles you want: “It’s really about being transparent, and being comfortable to give your opinion and, and to ask for what you want to do and where you want to work or, what type of assignment you’d like to have. And so, it all circles back to that passion,” Siemen insisted.

4. Find a way to make a difference no matter what role you are in: Wherever you are in the organization today, there’s a way to make a difference, according to Trisa Thompson, longtime Chief Sustainability Officer of Dell Technologies who retired recently. She said, “You have a job, whatever it is, you could be in marketing, you could be a supply chain engineer. Where do you see low hanging fruit, whether it’s in your job description or not, that can make a difference in your company? And how do you go get that done?”

To illustrate, Thompson told the story of a woman at Dell who came to her with an idea for how to help earthquake victims in Haiti: “This was a woman who was in corporate communications at Dell, and she saw this opportunity to use social media for disaster relief. That has nothing to do with Dell.” The woman suggested to Thompson that Dell’s technology could help get relief to victims by identifying where the victim is located. “We can find out where that person is, where the message is coming from, for the American Red Cross,” Thompson explained, and share the victim’s location with the Red Cross, so “they can direct their supply and their people and their volunteers and everything where it’s needed and what’s needed…. That had nothing to do with this woman’s job, but here she had this great idea.”

5. Take a course to “beef yourself up…in areas you might be a little weak”: Thompson said that if you want to advance and you feel insecure about your knowledge in a certain area, like finance for example, take a course to fill in your knowledge gaps. It’ll increase your confidence too.

6. Join a nonprofit community board: “Go join a nonprofit board in your community and take a leadership role there, because it will give you opportunities you won’t necessarily have at work, but you can translate it to your work,” Thompson added. “You will get noticed if you’re taking a leadership role in your community, senior management notices that.”

7. Look for opportunities in places you might not expect: Suzanne DiBianca, EVP of Corporate Relations and Chief Impact Officer at Salesforce said she’s seeing a “boom” in this work across industries. “More venture money has gone into climate tech than ever in history, in the U.S. in particular, but all over the world. And there are great companies (doing)…such amazing innovation.”

There are career opportunities for all kinds of roles in these companies, because they need marketing, sales, IT, finance, HR, etc. just like anywhere else. “Like the employees leverage the work that we do at Salesforce that are maybe in different parts of the company, but they’ll take either their volunteer time or their film expertise, for example, and sort of point it towards the work that we’re doing,” is an example she gave.

Summed up her career advice, which dovetails with Thompson’s and Siemen’s, as “Either stay put where you are and look for places to make an impact based on your skill set and what the company’s committed to, or there are all kinds of incredible entrepreneurs out there doing amazing things in the world. And I’d find a passion area, whether it’s workforce development or education or climate and go do it.”