Sustainability Professionals

This chapter is devoted to the understanding of the emerging sustainability professional. We will discuss the development of the profession, detailing what it means to be a sustainability professional, the characteristics of this work, the required specific skill sets and competencies, motivations and values driving sustainability work, and tasks and practices that it involves. You will realise that implementing sustainability is an important but tricky job because sustainability is a complex phenomenon requiring sustainability professionals to address conflicting commercial goals and sustainability goals. Therefore, it is hard to implement and measure its success. Also, due to the emergent nature of the profession, sustainability professionals need to put extra effort into building their power within an organisation to acquire much-needed managerial support and often scarcely available resources to succeed in their sustainability work. At the end of the chapter, we discuss strategies that sustainability professionals can undertake to succeed in their tough job. In particular, we discuss how sustainability professionals can promote sustainability within an organisation while safeguarding their personal motivations and values, as well as how to execute their tasks and practices in a way that does justice to all the different stakeholders, organisational needs and job demands.