Introducing the Climate Job Finder Framework
Each of us has the talents and skills to make a difference in the climate space today. The key is finding a role that unlocks our potential. The Climate Job Finder Framework can help.
So you want to work in the climate space? Rad! We need all of the help we can get.
It might seem counterintuitive, but I think that the right place to start your journey into the climate space is with an inward turn to focus in on what you do well–what I like to call your zone of genius–as opposed to what you think the world needs. That’s because:
Every job can be a climate job;
There is no single solution for the climate crisis; and
What you need and what the world needs changes over time.
If you start from what the world needs instead, the scale of the problem is so overwhelming and the number of organizations doing great work is so massive that you risk bouncing around in a frenetic swirl of activity that gets you no closer to your goal. The risks of shutting down before you really get started are high. To give you a sense of overwhelm that awaits, the So You Want to Work in Climate google sheet includes 60 communities, 80 newsletters to read, more than 80 job boards, 40 opportunities to volunteer, and more. That’s more information than any person could process–and it’s just one resource. There are also industry or professional groups that help people transition into the climate space like creatives for climate community or the climate career resources for tech workers. If you want to start by talking to someone, you can scroll through the 1,500+ climate professionals (including me) in the #OpenDoorClimate directory and reach out.
Back to you. Begin by narrowing down all of this selection into something that is manageable and aligns with where you excel. While assessment and introspection are critical, I firmly believe that we learn best by doing. So once you read this piece and have a hypothesis of where you play best, go find one of those resources, down-select to the relevant section, and start testing.
When it comes to a job, I think that the most relevant part is its day-to-day reality (check out my recent piece on finding flow at work for more on how to move towards a reality and energizes you). What you don’t want is a role that presents sexy on LinkedIn or in conversation but entails a day-to-day filled with drudgery. For me, this “cool from far but far from cool” job is a renewable energy project developer. Love the idea. Love the impact. But the day-to-day of financial modeling and negotiations just isn’t for me. And that’s ok.
After you have a sense of where you can find flow at work, the next step is to map the activities that enable you to flow onto the types of roles where they are most present, then further refine your search based on your risk profile and the level of scale at which you want to operate. Since I can’t pass up an opportunity to put out a framework with a catchy (?) name, I’ve bundled them into the 4Rs of the Climate Job Finder Framework: Role, Risk, Range, Reach.
Role
Your role is a function of two things: your day job and the organizational context in which you operate. I’m about to get slightly reductive, but bear with me. Let’s break the world into two types of roles–direct and indirect–and two types of organizations: climate and non-climate. Direct owners are the people responsible for a business or key outcome, while those of us in indirect roles provide ancillary services that help the project, business, or organizational owner achieve specific outcome goals. While the line for direct roles to climate impact is clearer, indirect roles can have massive climate impacts as well; if you don’t believe me, check out the Project Drawdown Job Function Action Guides for ideas and inspiration.
I define climate organizations as those that are working directly on one of the big wedges in global greenhouse gas emissions by sector (e.g. steel, livestock, road transportation, etc.), Our World in Data has a nice breakdown here. Non-climate organizations are those that still generate impacts (e.g. all organizations) and can take steps to reduce the impact of their organization through their internal operations, policies, and how they engage with their value chain partners.
These distinctions create four job quadrants: direct & climate | direct & non-climate | indirect & climate | indirect & non-climate. I’ve sketched out a few initial thoughts on roles and organizations that fall into these categories below, but before getting there, here’s a question to get you in the mood for finding your quadrant.
When a direct owner of a business responds to you with, “I really cared about sustainability in my own life and recycle, but it’s really hard to prioritize in my job because…” do you:
A. View that as an invitation to work with that person to structure the incentives in a way that helps them achieve their business goals while reducing impacts;
B. Think about how you can get into that job to meet their objectives and reduce impacts more quickly and effectively;
C. Think of how the service they provide could be delivered in a new way that would render their approach–and maybe even your organization–obsolete;
D. Think that the regulations need to be update to change that sentence to “I really cared about sustainability in my own life and recycle, and now the regulations allow me to better live my values while scaling my widget business”; or
E. Think that they aren’t working at a key climate leverage point so a better use of your time would be moving to an organization with a more direct impact because you just. can’t. handle. having. this. conversation. one. more. time.
Risk
I was recently speaking with an entrepreneur who described life in a startup as going to the gym every morning knowing that the workout is going to kick your ass, but never knowing what weights you’re going to lift and in what order. Imagine greeting that person at the gym every morning.
Now imagine that it’s Saturday at 6pm and that entrepreneur calls and says that it’s time to head to the gym because five minutes ago he found out that the BIGGEST GAME OF THE YEAR is happening on Monday. Do you:
A. Give your family a kiss and head to the gym feeling alive;
B. Tell him that you’ll be there later and work out from 10pm - 2am, trying to balance the gym with family but losing time for everything else and incurring the wrath of everyone;
C. Read the gym contract and point out that you aren’t allowed to work out on Saturdays but say you can be there Monday at 9am;
D. Head to the gym but realize on Monday afternoon that you’re at a point in your life where you need fewer surprise competitions; or
E. Resolve to find a job where every competition and milestone is known months or years in advance?
Your answer is irrelevant. What matters is that you’re honest with yourself about how you’d answer this question today. For those of you who prefer more straightforward questions, consider things like:
From low to high, what’s your level of financial risk tolerance? How much money do you need to feel secure right now?
How much do you value day-to-day role predictability?
Are you more comfortable with long-term projects and clean objectives or an environment where the only constant is change?
Range
All products, industries, organizations, causes, and teams have a life cycle: they begin, they end, and in the interim they grow and contract. The amount of growth and how it happens is variable. Not all things that start as an idea achieve scale; companies and ideas that seem permanent today will be forgotten in the future. One day, we’ll be made fun of for remembering that back in the day people used to use a search engine called Google–or something like that. And so it goes.
Thankfully, we live in a world of rapid innovation, which means that you can determine where in this maturation lifecycle you’re at your best. I’m at my best from ideate to the beginning of scale. It’s one of the reasons I like writing; it gives me an opportunity to connect the dots and show people where I think things are headed.
Let’s pretend that you can have a job that brings out your best and puts you in flow. Let’s further assume that it has the right amount of risk and predictability for you right now. With all that as a given, would you rather be:
A. Doing groundbreaking science and bringing new ideas into the world. There are a lot of dead ends, but sometimes magic happens;
B. Commercializing new ideas at the beginning. It may take years and grit and luck to get a product to market, but doing so could change an industry;
C. Scaling a product to the masses that is just starting to take off. When you imagine your future self, you want to be talking to Reid Hoffman on Masters of Scale reminiscing about those crazy times;
D. Managing, growing, and optimizing an existing business. You’re a professional manager, and deeply enjoy the process of increasing the size and profitability of your area. You deliver incremental and step function improvements;
E. Managing a steady state product or organization. You value predictability, and seek improvements at the edges to the business, customer experience, and financial performance;
F. Gracefully winding something down. Everything that goes up must go down; thankfully, there are people like you who can land any plane, regardless of if it falling out of the sky, with grace and aplomb; or
G. Writing the rules and/or securing the policy and funding that makes this innovation curve possible. You love seeing all of this work and take satisfaction in the role you played in pushing a policy, agreement, or regulation that kick started the entire thing even though your name will never be next to the stars of the industry.
For those who prefer poorly drawn visuals, here’s how I think about the innovation and development lifecycle.
Reach
Which room where it happens do you want to be in? There are global rooms, local rooms, and everything in between. For simplicity, I’ve broken it down into three types of rooms: global rooms that work on topics that impact all people and industries (e.g. climate change and the UNFCCC negotiations), global rooms that span the globe but only directly impact some people and communities (e.g. tropical deforestation or banning CFCs under the Montreal Protocol), and local rooms that have an impact on the local community and climate. These distinctions are artificial, but I think that they’re helpful.
For this last thought experiment, consider which of these would be an exceptional outcome to your work on climate:
A. You serve on a technical secretariat that drafts new policy and guidelines for decarbonizing an industry;
B. You contribute to the final form of a climate policy or regulation at the global or national level;
C. You contribute to the final form of a climate policy or regulation at the state or local level;
D. A bench at a community garden bears your name;
E. The walkability of your city doubled because of your behind-the-scenes work as an urban planner;
F. Your work bringing back local plants led to a rewilding of an area near your home and the return of native species;
G. You made an organization with global reach more sustainable;
H. You made a climate organization more successful based on your contributions;
I. ________________________
Here are some of the organizations and types of impacts that come to mind across these axes for me:
Conclusion
Having gotten this far, I’d say that this piece was:
A. Helpful
B. Interesting and a little bit entertaining
C. A & B
D. None of the above
There is so much good that each of us can do for the climate. To translate our latent potential into action and impact, we need to start from who we are and what we bring to the table. If you start from what you think the world needs and then try to shoehorn yourself into that role or space, you risk being disappointed in your day-to-day work and feeling adrift when the surefire thing you planned to do becomes obsolete.
***
For those who prefer the powerpoint version, here’s a link to the slides I presented to Rupesh Shah’s class at Presidio Graduate School graduate school class in February 2024 while I was iterating on this piece. I thank his class for their engagement and helpful feedback, which helped sharpen this piece.