One of the biggest hurdles for people looking to break into an environmental career is skills gap. It doesn't matter if you are a recent grad or looking to change careers, skill gaps are a plague nearly everyone looking for a job faces. It's important as it always is to see challenges as opportunities. Regardless if you believe that your skill gap is because your university program didn't prepare you or if you spent too long being comfortable in the first era of your career, or if you just woke up one morning and decided it was time for a change. Having the need to fill a skill is an opportunity. Here's what I mean. 

You see the skill gap as a hindrance, and it is, for now. It will only continue to be an obstacle if you don't do anything proactive about it. It's only when you decide to do something about it that it becomes an opportunity. The opportunity can come in many forms such as: 

• An excuse to network - you'll now have a valid reason to seek persons of...

You’re excited — but also nervous. 

You got the interview, now it’s time to get ready.

13 quick tips to help you prepare for your upcoming job interview.

Before the Interview Tips:

1. Research the company

Awaken your inner stalker. Do some research into the company you’re interviewing for. 

Look at the company’s website, check out their LinkedIn, Google them, Bing them, read news articles, and keep researching until you have a thorough understanding of the company’s culture, mission, and values.

2. Dress for success

Making a good first impression is EVERYTHING.  

Research the company’s dress code and make sure you dress accordingly. You don’t wanna be wearing basketball shorts when everyone else is in suits. 

3. Prepare a few relevant short stories

Don’t just regurgitate what’s on your resume.  

Instead — highlight your skills with short stories explaining how you got them, why you...

Keep Hope Alive

I hope that you and your family and friends are well during this uncharted time. I wanted to share some encouragement and suggestions for staying productive and shifting your career search at this time. 

Many of you may have been looking when things started to shut down, others may have had jobs and are fortunate to still be working - be safe out there! If you know someone who could benefit from this info please share. 

Suggestion #1

Use this time to fill gaps in your resume, explore new skills, read, or take a course. We're offering 50% rebate back for anyone who completes the Online Job Search Action Plan Course. We are not making it free because it has been shown that free courses have a 90% drop in completion rate due to lack of incentive. Finish the course and get rewarded for your effort!

START COURSE NOW

Suggestion #2

Focus on networking. People are seeking connection at this time. It is the perfect excuse to invite a stranger to a video chat....

Does anyone want to give me a job? Anybody? Hello?

Does asking for an informational interview feel a little like begging to you?  Experts keep saying that informational interviews are getting harder to get yet those same experts are encouraging career seekers to keep asking for them. Let’s put an end to the informational interview, shall we? Or, at least, let’s define them better.

The most difficult aspects of asking for an informational interview are:

• Being unsure who to invite
• Being unsure what to say in the invite
• It just feels awkward 

I believe a lot of that comes from the use of the term “interview”. My suggestion is that we stop calling these things informational interviews as they have come to be known - attempts to cheat the systems and get hired without waiting for a job to be posted. It is for that reason, people are becoming less and less likely to accept your invitation. 

Instead of asking the VP of the environmental firm...

I refer to your resume, LinkedIn profile, and networking plan as your job search essential. Each of these works together to help ensure your best chances of getting invited to interview. Often times job seekers focus on just the resume. You might have a killer resume but if you end up getting compared to someone with a great networking reference or a professional looking LinkedIn profile, you’ve essentially devalued your resume.

The jobs search essentials are the tools in your toolbelt for getting an interview and you won’t likely get an interview without some combination of the three so let’s dive into each of these in more detail.

I don’t think anyone would argue that a resume is a must for every job seeker. There will always be a counter-advice argument that so-and-so’s cousin got an awesome job without ever handing in a resume but that doesn’t translate into good advice for you. Your resume should be succinct, I personally recommend 1 page...

I occasionally receive messages like this: “I am currently studying environmental policy. I've done research with elephants, noise pollution, and ocean studies. I want to make a positive impact for global climate change. There's so many paths I could take, how do I know what to do?” 

Career seekers struggle with a few areas more than others. One of those struggle areas is coming up with an answer to the seemingly simple question, “What do you want to do?” Some struggle with the fear of making a choice. Once the choice is made the pressure of making it happen causes a high amount of anxiety from fear of failure. Others struggle with being interested in too many things. No one environmental-related degree equates to a single career path so even if your degree is in policy, you might find your interest crosses over into conservation or ocean science. 

Your career search will go much smoother if you have an idea of the direction you want to go in....

You’ve got an interview coming up for an environmental position. How do you prepare? What will they ask you? How can you stand out?

90% of the mastering an interview is standard issue, meaning it would apply to any job in any industry.

Things like dressing appropriately, making eye contact, and following up. What you need to know is the kind of info you can’t just find by searching “how to prepare for an interview?” You need to know that other 10%, the 10% that relates directly to environmental positions.

Here are some environmental interview specific example cases and recommendations for how to handle them: 

Stop waiting for the experience to fall in your lap and go out and get it.

Past experience

It’s common to think your college didn’t prepare you for that first job because the reality is that they didn’t. You know what permitting is but you haven’t done it. You understand the concept of water monitoring and sampling but you...

You may have noticed lately that we made some changes to our brand to more consistently infuse the word ENVIROlocity™.

You may be wondering what exactly does this mean?

At first, this was a word that we felt personified the phrase Work Worth Living and Environmental careers. It is a combination of "Environment" and "velocity". We personally feel that any work worth doing is going to have to include an environmental aspect. Ever since we chose the word it has expanded to mean all the things we consider valuable at The Environmental Career Coach including: 

• Seeking Work Worth Living
• Work with meaning and purpose 
• Passion for environmental careers
• More than just jobs, we focus on careers 
• Finding your spark to accelerate your career search
• Mastering the fundamentals of the job search to land your next job faster

From our experience, work that is just a job will always lead to frustration and feeling imbalanced as there is no way to find work/life balance when...

Getting your environmental degree most likely means you’ll need to complete at least one internship. One the one hand it seems exciting to have hands-on experience, on the other hand, it can be scary. Procrastination is one of the worst things you can do because of the good internships, the ones that pay or are at the local aquarium, go fast. Waiting until the final hour also increases your stress because you’ll get more rejections and feel like you’re running out of options.

Here are three things you can do to rest assured that the internship is coming:

1. Start looking early. The best time to start looking is now, even if you don’t need the internship until next year or another semester. Starting early will allow you to start networking in the right places (see #2). It wouldn’t hurt to ask if you can get on the waitlist for popular programs more than a semester out.
2. Network both online and in-person. You’ve got your LinkedIn profile up to date,...

Sustainability. What is it? Why do you want to do it? How do you get a job doing it?

The majority of people that I talk to for coaching, no matter their background, are looking for a “sustainability” career. The problem they all face is not knowing what that really means for them. It boils down to “I want to do good and I want to fight climate change.”

Sustainability itself is extremely broad. It doesn’t help that the definitions are not universally established as you can see in these different definitions.

“Sustainability has often been defined as how biological systems endure and remain diverse and productive. But, the 21st-century definition of sustainability goes far beyond these narrow parameters. Today, it refers to the need to develop the sustainable models necessary for both the human race and planet Earth to survive.” - Sustainabilitydegrees.com

The most often quoted definition comes from the UN World Commission on Environment and...