How to Map your Skills & Values to Build a Green Career Plan

If you’re interested in pursuing a green career, identifying your sustainability identity can be a key first step. Knowing your own values, the things you care about, the things you’re curious about, and your existing inner strengths can help you really dive deep into what you want to contribute within your career.

The next step is taking what you’ve learned about yourself and translating it into actionable steps you can take for your green career. In this article, we’re going to look at some exercises that will help you to take that learning and turn it into direction. We’ll look at:

• What you already bring to the table (your skills)

• What matters to you (your values)

• How to bring those two things together (your direction)

From these, we will create some actionable next steps to really start building your green career plan.

Step 1: Map Your Skills (What you already bring)

You likely already have a very strong foundation of existing skills from all your personal and professional experience. Identifying those key skills and being able to articulate them to others is an important first step, and we’re going to start there.

We’ll look at two different types of green skills: technical and transferable.

Technical skills: These are specific and often role-dependent and will vary hugely depending on your experience and the kinds of work you want to do. They could be things like:

• Data analysis

• Research methods

• Curriculum design

• GIS

• Policy analysis

Transferable skills: These are the strong skills that you have and can use across sectors. They could be:

• Communication

• Facilitation

• Creativity

• Stakeholder engagement

• Systems Thinking

Exercise: Build your skills map

Set a timer for 5 minutes and write down:

• 5-10 technical skills you have

• 5-10 transferable skills you have

When the time is up, look over your list. We're going to go one step further.

From what you’ve identified, ask yourself:

• What 3 skills do you enjoy using the most?

• What 3 skills do people consistently rely on you for?

These questions can help you identify your key skills. We’ll need these again at a future step!

Step 2: Defining Your Career Values (Your direction)

We’ve taken a deep dive into why aligning our career with our values is so important and we can also deeply reflect on our own core values which often guide our decisions and our goals. We can also now reflect on our values to help us identify what kind of careers will be better suited to us.

Exercise: Clarify what matters to you

For each of these reflection questions, set a 2 minute timer and write down anything that comes to mind:

1. What kind of impact do you want to have?

   1. Educating others?

   2. Influencing policy?

   3. Supporting sustainable business decisions?

   4. Doing research?

   5. Something else?

      
      

2. What issues do you care about most? I recommend doing our interests exercise here to gain clarity on this. Your answers might lead you to:

   1. Sustainable cities & transport

   2. Corporate sustainability & systems change

   3. Environmental education

   4. Climate justice

   5. Something entirely different!

      
      

From the lists you created, identify your top 1-3 focus areas. We’ll use this finding in the next step.

Step 3: Finding the Overlap & Direction

Now we can start bringing our key findings together! Let’s connect your skills & values into a direction.

Exercise: Create Your Direction Statement

Look back at all the skills you’ve identified as well as your values and key areas of focus.

Now, complete the sentence:

“I want to use my skills in _______ to contribute to ___________.”

Take your time with this one. You might find that you can actually create a few different sentences. The more detail you can add here, the more precise of a direction you can take for your next steps.

You might create a sentence like:

• “I want to use my communication skills to contribute to climate engagement campaigns.”

• “I want to use my project management skills to deliver sustainability initiatives within organisations.”

This is the foundation for your green career plans. After you've gotten clear on your direction statement, the next step is starting to identify roles that allow you to work on this direction.

Step 4: Turn Direction into Action

Hopefully, you’ve been able to gain some clarity on the direction you want to focus your green career. The next step is to turn that direction into actionable steps so you can actually start working towards your green career.

Exercise: Your next career actions

Decide on one action for each category and a timeline for it:

1. Learn – What’s one thing you can learn to close a gap in your focus area? Are there any courses or webinars you could attend?

2. Experience – Are there any opportunities to apply your skills in a sustainability context? This could be volunteering or just a personal portfolio piece.

3. Connect – Who can you learn from? You could identify someone and ask to have an informational interview, attend a networking event or join an online community.

Final Thoughts

Green careers can be so varied, so identifying where you feel you fit, what you want to contribute to, and the kind of work you want to do is really that first step in building your green career plan.