Syndicated Features Archive

Jobs Our Parents Never Heard Of

By Melissa Everett

Here's one more reason to dread the infamous party question, "What do you do for a living?" When you're talking about a fair number of the positions connected with protecting and restoring the environment, it is not easy to answer that question in less than 1000 words. Does Thanksgiving dinner, with family questions, send you into performance anxiety? That's because so many new environmental jobs come in such unorthodox packages.

Farmers, zoo-keepers, and engineers have it easy. What they do is widely understood. But many of the jobs now emerging, in response to environmental initiatives and opportunities, are brand new creations. For the job-seeker, a new level of research savvy is required to make sure the most fascinating opportunities don't fall outside the scope of your search.

Steve Greska moved out of electronics manufacturing to become a Toxics Use Reduction Planner, then found his way into a newly created position training other TURPs. While companies everywhere have pollution prevention specialists, only Massachusetts has TURPs -- professionals certified to approve the Toxics Use Reduction Plans the state requires companies to file, under an innovative statute that has greatly reduced industrial emissions. The Toxics Use Reduction Institute, housed at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, employs a staff of 25 to support the statute through industrial training and research on safer chemical substitutions. Wisely, the statute doesn't require companies to make process changes unless they will be profitable. So TURPs, whose background is usually in engineering and pollution prevention, become agents of environmental innovation in companies throughout the state.

Laurel Severson is Administrator for Rideshare Services for the Giant 3M Company. When any 3M employee on the planet needs help in getting to work, Laurel's phone rings. On the company's home turf, in Minnesota, her major role is coordinating the 25-year old van pooling program, the first in the country. That means equal parts logistics and diplomacy. "To make an alternative transportation program work, you have to be a really good problem solver, listener, and people person," she says. "I've helped groups iron out questions from who gets picked up first to whether Friday is donut day to whether the van should be fragrance-free." Sometimes, though, her role is mission-critical. When the San Francisco earthquake rained rubble on a mountain pass used by factory workers in a 3M plant, keeping employees on the factory lines became Laurel's nonstop job.

"Not once in my life have I landed in a predictable job," she laughs. This one found her because she wore two hats: a volunteer van pool driver herself, and administrator of a program developing contracts between 3M and hotels, run by the same operating group as the van program. When the vacancy arose, her colleagues drafted her.

These two new job fields, pollution prevention and transportation planning, have one thing in common. They have both been mainstreamed, beyond a few visionary companies, in part by government regulation. In the case of transportation planning (and related initiatives like telecommuting), there has been a distinct ebb and flow in corporate interest depending on state regulations.

This points to a job search strategy that's much more elegant than poring through ads -- going upstream to follow the changes in policy that dictate some of the work to be done. That same "upstream" strategy also means tracking the flow of foundation funding, and private sector investment, in order to know where the work is about to be. This requires an understanding of the field, which takes some time; but it's more empowering and typically generates more leads than simply watching for ads. The trick is to identify a small number of key information sources to monitor for your specific interest, including association newsletters, databases on grants, and even the good old Wall Street Journal.

True, this is a reactive approach. Wouldn't it just be easier to visualize the work to be done, and then prospect for the dream jobs? Sometimes that works. But listen to a cautionary note from Kevin Doyle, Director of National Programs for the Environmental Careers Organization: