Building Your Environmental Career

Understanding global and national issues is critically important for all environmental professionals. To build and maintain a successful career, however, requires much more. Mastering the seven basic steps below will put a person ahead of the crowd in today's ultra-competitive environmental marketplace.

Seven Steps to a Great Environmental Career

Know yourself
Get focused
Know what's going on in the world around you
Start growing your career network
Get the targeted skills and experience you need
Master the job search basics: resumes, cover letters, research, and interviews
Be a great performer

Step One: Know Yourself

Many professionals spend over half their waking hours at work. Think about that for a moment. With so much riding on it, it's essential that your job be a good fit.

Fortunately, there are many wonderful resources available to environmental job seekers in the form of career advisors and coaches, books, websites, and classes. One tool that many people have found useful is the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI). Based on an extensive questionnaire and professional follow-up, the MBTI provides valuable clues to help jobseekers select work that maximizes their unique personality. Most college career offices offer the Myers-Briggs analysis.

Whether you use Myers-Brigg, some other tool, or simply quiet reflection, self-knowledge is critical for career advancement.

Step Two: Get Focused

Respected career coach Barbara Sher tapped into a rich vein of anxiety when she titled a book, I could Do Anything….If Only I Knew What It Was. Narrowing your job search focus is perhaps the most difficult task on the way to landing a great environmental job. Without a clear sense of where you want to end up, it's almost imporssible to create a plan of action to get there.

Environmental Career, Environmental Jobs

Getting focused doesn't mean putting yourself in a job straightjacket that will eliminate all other options forever. Nor does it mean nailing down every detail. Although some people can confidently say: "I want to be an Oceanographer II at the Coastal Services Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Charleston, South Carolina, for the next 3.5 years," most job seekers are much more general in their job hopes.

In today's interdisciplinary environmental world, one powerful tool for narrowing your career focus is to ask, "What do I want to create in the world?" Directing your attention to the results that you want to be a part of is useful for a number of reasons. Most importantly, this focus taps into a powerful trend in environmental work away from process and toward dramatic results.

Defining your job focus around achieving positive, dramatic, and measurable changes in the world has other advantages. It demonstrates to others that you are not looking for "a job," but rather for an effective platform from which you can make a difference. It opens you to a network of interdisciplinary professionals who are committed to creating the same change that you are.

Developing career direction based on the change you want to create is also perfect for those who have a wide array of different interests and therefore have a difficult time making a decision that seems to narrow future options. Most environmental issues are linked to one another. A person who focuses on air quality will soon be addressing transportation, energy production, and more. Ina very real sense, it doesn't matter where you start. It only matters that you get started.

Step Three: Know What's Going on in the World Around You

Without self-knowledge and focus, it is impossible to be proactive, increasing the possibility that a job seeker will simply respond to whatever comes along. Unfortunately, as everyone eventually learns, the employers of the world do not select people for jobs primarily on the basis of the applicant's hopes and dreams. Employers have agendas of their own, and the assets of each job seeker are viewed through the prisms of those needs.

To be a master of the job search process, you'll need knowledge of the trends and pressures that are guiding job selection decisions. Generally speaking, this information falls into four major categories:

Economic and societal "mega trends." The globalization of the world's economy is one example of a mega trend.
Issue-specific trends. People with an interest in global climate change, for instance, need information about leading-edge policy, action, funding, and research.
Sector-specific trends. Sectors are broad employment categories, such as state governments generally or the land trust community.
Employer-specific trends. Detailed information about organizations of interest to you.

Staying on top of this information may seem daunting - even impossible. If you have defined a career focus around making a particular change in the world, however, the task becomes easier.

Suppose, for example, your current passion is water rights issues in the American West. To keep a finger on the pulse of all four types of trends, you need only tap into a well-organized career network (see step four) for information on crucial journals to read, websites to visit, organizations to track, conferences to attend, and innovative leaders to seek out.

Step Four: Grow and Maintain Your Career Network

Most jobs are never advertised, and many of those that are advertised are eventually filled by people who are already in the employer's network. With this in mind, career advisors universally agree that all serious job seekers need a vibrant network of professional colleagues, friends, neighbors, relatives, and acquaintances to be successful. Years of surveys and studies support this commonsense observation.

Even so, "networking" has something of a bad name. The word has become associated with soulless opportunism and verification of the cynical belief that career advancement is based on "who you know, not what you know." Perhaps there are times when networking lived up to that nasty reputation. At its best, however, networking is a positive process through which people who are creatively engaged in making a difference support others who share their passion.

Whether a job seeker views networking as a necessary but unpleasant evil or an exciting opportunity to create lasting friendships with fascinating people, it's critically important for all job seekers to become skilled networkers. Effective career networking includes:

Reciprocity. You must give more than you take.

Referrals are essential. If you identify a person who you would like to meet, either for direct career reasons such as job leads or simply to share ideas, the most effective course of action is to seek a referral from someone respected by that person.

Quality, not quantity. The strength of a person's network is measured by whether it has the right people in it for his or her needs. It' not just a big Rolodex.

Get out there. Attend meetings. Send notes to speakers and writers whose work you admired. Pick up the phone and introduce yourself.

Little things mean a lot. A well-times "thank you" note, for instance, is helpful.

Stay in touch. Most of us are better at starting a relationship tan maintaining it, but maintaining relationships is one of the most important aspects of effective networking.

Step Five: Get the Skills and Experience That You Need

Every job announcement has a list of required qualifications. Although sometimes these qualifications are incomplete, misleading, or inaccurate, the focus on needed skills and experience is there for an obvious reason. Employers are looking for talented people with proven ability to get the job done.

No amount of "job search technique" can substitute for simply having the right mix of talents that employers seek. Employers seem to agree with a workforce assessment study prepared for the EPA in 1999. That study suggested a balance of ten essential abilities.

Top Ten Skills for Twenty-First Century Environmental Professionals

Communication ability (speaking, writing, visual, listening)
Collaboration ability
Creativity and innovation
Broad environmental science understanding
Analytical and critical thinking/problem-solving ability
A positive attitude/willingness to work hard
Information technology skills, including geographic information systems
Leadership ability
Occupation-specific skills
"Customer" orientation (focused on the needs of the stakeholders)

Step Six: Master the Job Search Basics

There are dozens of great books and websites about resume and cover letter writing, interviewing techniques, locating job listings, using the Internet, and so forth. Professional advisors at college career centers are also extremely competent at teaching these skills. Take advantage of these dedicated professionals!

Step Seven: Be a Great Performer, Leave a Legacy

With strong self-awareness, results-oriented focus, knowledge of trends, a growing career network, a balanced set of skills, and mastery of killer job search tactics, it won't be difficult to land a job, even in a difficult economy. Once you do, always remember: with each passing year, career advancement is mostly about stellar performance.

Material in this article is an excerpt from The ECO Guide to Careers That Make a Difference by The Environmental Careers Organization

EDITOR'S NOTE: For more information about this book or environmental careers, please contact Kevin Doyle at The Environmental Careers Organization.