What is a Corporate Social Responsibility/Environmental Career?
Roles in corporate responsibility and sustainability are rising faster than ever before. This type of role is broad and usually covers two sides; health and safety and sustainability, but you will mainly be responsible for working closely with site management and external agencies to ensure that all legal compliance and submission requirements are met as a part of any licence or permit to operate as a business. You will also work with customers to ensure sustainability and ethics are upheld.
Key responsibilities also include driving safety requirements for all staff who are working on-site. You also need to ensure that staff are maintaining legal compliance, achieving site targets; producing annual plans and reports to ensure continual improvements throughout all sites linked to the business.
Routes into a CSR/Environmental role:
- Studying in or passion for environmental engineering, sciences or ecology is helpful but not necessary
- High-level / higher-level apprenticeship
- Applying directly
- University degree
- Training with a professional body such as MDS
Skills and Knowledge
In a Corporate Social Responsibility/Environmental role, the skills you will need can be broken down into soft and hard skills. Soft skills are more transferable skills, whereas hard skills focus more on technical ability. There are many kinds of soft and hard skills but we will break down the most common ones.
CSR/Environmental Soft Skills:
- Coordination
- Planning
- Communication
- Organisation
- Communication
- Time management
CSR/Environmental Hard Skills:
- Business Management
- Analytical
- Leadership and project management
- Ecological
- Strategic
- Stakeholder management
- Budgeting and financial management
What you will be doing:
- Communicating positively with staff on health and safety-related matters and ensuring they are working in safe conditions
- Designing and implementing systems and processes that promote and protect an effective health and safety culture throughout the business in all departments
- Conducting regular audits and liaising with external bodies like health and safety inspectors and executives
- Developing and implementing environmental strategies and action plans to ensure corporate development
- Taking the lead on ensuring the procurement of sustainable goods and services
- Controlling all aspects of pollution control, energy management, conservation and environmental health
- Ensuring compliance with environmental legislation
- Auditing, analysing and reporting environmental performance to internal and external stakeholders and regulatory organisations
- Carrying out impact assessments to identify, assess and reduce an organisation’s environmental risks and financial costs
- Promoting and raising awareness of emerging environmental issues, whether legislative or best practices on corporate, ethical or social responsibility at all levels of the business
Career Path and Progression
There are a lot of career prospects for CSR/Environmental and you can be employed across a variety of areas. These include but are not limited to:
- Sustainable & Responsible Business Trainee
- Sustainability Officer/Co-ordinator
- CSR Specialist
- Social Impact Manager
- Environmental /CSR Manager
- Head of Sustainability/CSR
