What I do for a living

I am often asked what my job is. I don’t really enjoy answering this question because I feel like I’m selling something that I myself don’t understand clearly. I’m not even sure why I feel like I need to ‘sell’ my job as an being interesting or worthwhile. Yet, I do this anyway.

I will try to explain my job here and see if I can at least clear up in my own head what I ‘do for a living’.

My job title is ‘sustainability consultant’. Sustainability is a huge field, covering:

  • international development and poverty alleviation
  • renewable energy
  • community and civil engagement
  • corporate responsibility
  • environmental management
  • efficient manufacturing and other processes
  • ‘green’ buildings
  • environmental and welfare economics
  • climate change and carbon management
  • toxicology and land remediation
  • safe product design
  • public outreach

And so on.

Obviously, no one person can work in all areas of sustainability. My work particularly covers sustainability related to cities and urban systems — buildings, transport, energy supply, water supply, waste treatment, logistics, schooling… I also foray into job creation, habitat management, equity and access… Very peripherally, I also look at questions of public participation in decision making (e.g. voting), literacy, religious inclusion, and so on.

I generally work in developed countries, or at least the wealthier parts of developing countries (e.g. cities in China and the Middle East).

Most of my work is in large multidisciplinary projects. Typically, about 10 or 15 teams around the company (or from outside the company) are working together to design a new town or rebuild part of an existing city. My team’s job involves:

  • Working with the client and the teams to come up with indicators for sustainability;
  • Setting targets for the various indicators (e.g. There must be at least two jobs for every dwelling);
  • Collecting data from teams about their designs;
  • Integrating the data so that we can analyse the sustainability of the entire project (we often use models to do this quantitatively);
  • Giving results back to teams, highlighting problems with their data and alerting teams to opportunities to work together for better strategies;
  • Producing a report to give to the client

My role is often to manage the finances of the project, go to meetings with the project managers, present to the client, and coordinate the report. I don’t often do the modelling — there are others more capable of that than me.

That’s most of my job. Occasionally, I do projects that aren’t multidisciplinary. That’s when a client comes to our team directly and asks for strategic sustainability advice, like helping them develop a climate change policy.

I like my job. I like it because I get to look at the big picture. I like working in teams and meeting new people.

There are things I don’t like. Between teams, there are sometimes personality clashes and political issues about who does what work. Sometimes, I feel frustrated because I doubt our advice will actually be implemented in real life. At my most frustrated times, I wonder if I’m just a paper pusher, generating work for myself. What’s the point in producing a report that no one ever reads?

Now that I think about it, I guess that even if no one pays attention to a particular report I write, because I’ve learned from doing it, it will help me be more effective in the next project I do. That’s a happy thought, isn’t it!

2 comments

  1. Yap! It's 3088.. says:

    That’s a very honest sharing. I go through that too and it seems a little strange that I’ll soon be moving on from the client to the consultant side.

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