Careers and Climate Change…Is There a Difference?

The data is in. You really can’t deny it anymore. The seasons don’t change the way they used to at your office. People who were warm to you now get over the top angry. You look around at the staff and you realize there are less of them now, you hear they are all working virtually or offshore, but you don’t know, maybe the office environment just can’t sustain people any more.

Maybe your way of life and the career path you chose isn’t even of interest to young people anymore. Maybe life is changing in some fundamental way. Is there a hole in your career ozone?

As a recruiter, I see the parallels every day between Climate Change and Career Change:

• Starting is the hard part. If you want to do your part to save the environment, you start. Turn off lights, buy a hybrid car, waste less food, one less airplane ride a year is the equivalent of another person living without electricity for a year. Start now. Candidates who want a career change have to start. Write a resume, update your LinkedIn profile, dedicate a day to researching headhunters in your niche. Then call them! Just start.

• Respecting “Later.” The highest achieving candidates, the superstars, are uncomfortable with now being “good” and find the inner strength to consider how “LATER” they will feel differently than they do now, so they act before they have to, they make career moves when they don’t have to. This is why climate change is so hard. While effects are being felt now in many parts of the world, the truth is there will be very few differences in our climate in the next 20-30 years. So now is good. But LATER it will be different. Hurricanes and Typhoons will draw energy from hotter surfaces and be devastatingly intense. Coastal flooding will destabilize or eliminate great cities and beachfronts. Long term, we are looking at no less than the 6th mass extinction in the planet’s history. Waves of refugees. Wars over the collapse of food production and lack of water.

• “I have a friend who says…” I hear this all the time when a candidate is facing a new job at a new company. He/she is scared to be the newbie, scared to have to prove themselves, grown fat and complacent, they redirect their fear of change by saying they “heard” bad things about the company, they “know somebody who works there”, “I read an article online that says their market is precarious.”The Climate Change version is the ideologues, normally dependent on or funded by fossil fuel interests, undermining science by funding their own “experts”, cherry picking data, or focusing on blips in the weather and extrapolating false outcomes. Fear rebranded as logic. My candidates do it all the time.

• Live in the Present! I don’t like my job, but (fill in excuse, wedding/kids in school/medical issue/bonus pending) I can’t move now. I’ll figure it out when the time comes. I’m resourceful. It’s how I roll! No small amount of people accept climate change as real, but say, “hey, some techno geek will come up with something.” But the Uber Techno Geek, Bill Gates, says, “crossing our fingers and hoping for a technological miracle to save the climate is not a strategy.” Are you leaving your career strategy up to some burst of inspiration you may never have?

One final analogy. The naysayers, the gloom-and-doom folks, say we will never overcome climate change because of one simple fact grounded in economic theory:The costs for the future benefit of saving the planet are being paid by people who will never see the benefit. The gloom-and-doomers say that is not how the world works.

But I see candidates every day giving me referrals to colleagues and friends and advocates who they think might benefit if they knew about the job I was working on. They rarely ask me to mention their name, and they get no monetary remuneration. They want to see others do well. They want to give back. It is as primal an urge as eating or mating.

In fact, my candidates give me great faith that we will meet the climate change challenge. My candidates get, at marrow level, that they have one life, and therefore one career, and they can act now to make their lives and their children’s lives better… Is it that big a leap to realize that we all have but one home, and that we have to act now?