Most Important Skills for a Senior Manager Sustainability at Protiviti

I would say there are two critical skills that are highest priority in skill building. One would be storytelling.

A huge component of working in corporate sustainability, or addressing the climate crisis, really relies on your ability to navigate people's emotions. If you are trying to sell a project to a CFO or a client, there has to be context behind why it's important. There needs to be context behind the immediacy and urgency for companies, entities, and agencies to reduce emissions and operate in a more climate-friendly manner.

The secondary skill that's quite important is data analysis. A lot of sustainability work is derived in hard science and hard data. An example of that would be greenhouse gas emissions accounting.

This is a scientific method for identifying where a company's opportunities to reduce its environmental impact exist. This is most specifically related to the amount of greenhouse gas they are outputting into the atmosphere. The more greenhouse gas you put into the atmosphere, the more challenging it becomes to self-regulate global temperatures.

Being very rooted in science and data, you have to be able to parse through lots of lines of Excel. So one is data analysis and then two is data interpretation, trying to be quite neutral about what the data is showing you.

Also, rely heavily on existing methodologies and documentation like the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, or information provided by the EPA and governmental agencies. I would say those are the two components of the job that really require a pretty heavy hand.