Essay on "Career Opportunities Exist in This Relatively New"

Essay 4 pages (1622 words) Sources: 6

[EXCERPT] . . . .

career opportunities exist in this relatively new field of Sustainability Management? What are the career job titles, pay ranges, career paths? What information does O*Net provide (http://www.onetonline.org/)?

The website ontonline.org is invaluable in finding a wide variety of positions including those in Sustainability Management. This area is encompasses many engineering, logistics and operations areas within companies and is expected to be one of the highest growth areas of employment globally for the next several years (Welsh, 2009). Of the many jobs shown on the website, the one considered to have one of the brightest outlooks is the role of Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO). This is a senior-level position and that encompasses the engineering and scientific-based aspects of sustainability efforts including defining frameworks for evaluating the environmental impact of their organizations. The pay range for an average Chief Sustainability Officers average an impressive salary of $165,080 annually and often have over two decades of experience in this field. There are projected to be a need for over 112,000 new CSOs by 2018 according to the website onetonline.org. The career path to get a job as a CSO needs to include expertise in defining compliance and sustainability programs for reducing energy use, ensuring resource conservation and pollution reduction. Those that navigate their careers through compliance requirements of federal and state agencies will also have a significant advantage in getting to this position in their careers.

If you are intend to remain in your current field, how will the impact of SBD change roles and responsibilities for positions in your profession or discipline?

The role of sustainability will impact every area of a company's value chain over the long-term, forcing greater compliance on the one hand and greater focus on lean operations on the other. it's a double-edged sword for many businesses who will need to navigate between compliance and the ability to trim their operations from a lean process workflows standpoint to attain cost reductions. The forward-thinking companies are using sustainability and its many requirements as a catalyst for changing their companies for the better. These lean process control improvements in addition to lean process manufacturing to support complex supply chain strategies including reverse logistics are what many in the government see as a catalyst for long-term employment growth (Wood, 2009). The implications of any selling, service, production and aftermarket strategy will have direct implications on sustainability management and the footprint their companies leave on the environment. As sustainability management is now a metric that companies are evaluated by suppliers and by many consumers, it is feasible that marketing strategies will be augmented to reflect the consideration of sustainability factors over time. Sustainability Management and its many implications on employment will also force a higher level of compliance and adoption by many industries as the value of pursuing lean operations will be proven with measurable financial results over time (Wood, 2009).

What industry associations relate to Sustainability or Green? Which would be relevant to your career interests? What information could they provide for you/your professional pursuits?

There are literally thousands of associations dedicated to sustainability or green initiatives globally, segmented by industry, product or service and by region as well. What unifies all of these associations together are best practices in managing the challenges of transforming existing businesses into sustainable enterprises over time. The primary benefit of trade associations is that they focus energy and investment on the most critical success factors for a given industry or product and service area to ensure higher levels of accomplishment and performance (Rice, Gullison, Reid, 1997). The associations most relevant to career interests include Ceres, Center for a Sustainable Economy, Consumer Electronics Association, the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), and the Green Electronics Council (GEC). Each of these associations deal with one or several aspects of the high technology value chain and the need for seeing sustainability as a catalyst of profitable change to business processes in addition to attaining compliance. They are invaluable from a career standpoint in that they each provide insights into the unmet needs for sustainability pain points and needs within companies, which can serve as a roadmap for future career planning as well. Many of these associations also have job and career sections on their websites and also in their events and programs as well. All of these elements taken together make them ideal for getting up to speed on a given industry's needs for sustainability and where the job opportunities are.

Part B. "If you are intend to remain in your current field, how will the impact of SBD change roles and responsibilities for positions in your profession or discipline?"

First Student

The impact of Sustainability Business Development (SBD) is already having a very significant and lasting impact on my current field which is supply chain management. The sustainability management and green initiatives are making compliance, reporting and analytics even more critical than before, as is the need for managing the deep layers of a supply network. This is perhaps the greatest change to my area of career interest. Sustainability management is making it possible, from a positive standpoint, to see several layers deep into a supply chain for organic products, back to the original source in many cases (Rice, Gullison, Reid, 1997). This is changing the ethics and economics of supply chains and in the process opening up much greater transparency over what is going with a given commodity or product. All of these factors are driving greater change into supply chain compliance and will continue to accelerate the need for analytics and better reporting as well. The bottom line is that sustainability management and the development of more effective programs for tracking how effective a supply chain is or not is going to become critical for future growth of any industry. Roles and responsibilities will change over time based on the availability of better and more complete data on supply chain compliance as well.

Second Student

In my current field of being an it business analyst, the role of sustainable business development (SBD) will play a strategic role in defining which factories get built or not, which servers and it equipment get bought, and how production partners are chosen throughout Asia. Much is being written today about how sustainability management is changing the job outlook in the U.S. And throughout Europe with the cost of greater costs of compliance (the Economist, 2011). Environmentalists are all over this as a major win for their efforts to regulate emissions and make the world a cleaner, healthier place to live in. This is noble but doesn't really deal with the issue of how sell sustainability into corporate America. The typical CEO is more interested in how being in compliance can save them money and make them more competitive. If sustainability business development is going to deliver on its potential, it will have to talk in the language of the C-level executive. That means talking in dollars and Return on Investment (ROI) over the more unquantifiable but very valid aspects of sustainability. If SBD is ever going to really take off it has to find its champions in the boardrooms of the world -- and that means talking in terms they understand. The jobs paradox needs to get beyond the costs of compliance and show the value above all (the Economist, 2011). For my career to progress I need to do the same, especially in the area of sustainability management and environmental initiatives.

Part C: "What industry associations relate to Sustainability or Green? Which would be relevant to your career interests? What information could they provide for you/your professional pursuits?"

First Student

Combining an interest in chemistry, clean water recycling and the ability to transform entire regions of India by being able to irrigate them more cost-effectively, the associations… READ MORE

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