Tomorrow’s young leaders: trainee resilience officers?
As this year’s graduates seek jobs in a volatile world, Philip Monaghan asks if the increasing demands on organisations to demonstrate resilience suggest the rise of a new career path.
Philip Monaghan is a writer and strategist in the fields of economic development and environmental sustainability. He is the author of the acclaimed Sustainability in Austerity (2010) and the forthcoming Hard to Make, Hard to Break: How Local Resilience Creates Sustainable Societies (out February 2012).
Will trainee ‘Resilience Officer’ be the graduate fair job of 2015?
This is the time of year when UK universities send many fresh-faced graduates out into the weird and wonderful world of employment.
Environment related career options are increasingly the norm, ranging from opportunities in environmental consultancy and renewable energy technology to nature conservation. But will these posts best equip the employee and employer with the skills and capabilities that we will need for the UK to be competitive further down the line? Maybe. Maybe not. We should consider what career paths may look like at the Graduate Fairs of 2015 and beyond.
First things first though; let us start with the present day. It is a strange and difficult time to be entering the jobs market. Not just in terms of the scarcity of opportunities in an age of austerity, but also in terms of the new and complex challenges we now face. If in 2007 you were to tell someone that just four years later we would live in a world where banks are nationalised (to bail out a failed economic system) and nature is privatised (to generate new wealth from ecosystem services), at best you would have been laughed at.
A fast changing, complex world is nothing new. But such volatility means anyone interested in sustainable development – in business, public sector or civil society alike – is challenged to ensure their organisation, community or network is resilient to such changes. That is, having the capability to understand the complex systems you live in and to make smart interventions accordingly. So when shocks occur – be they food price hikes or energy blackouts – you are able to bounce back, learn and transform.
So what? This means any organisational development strategy of value should now factor in the need for a new set of skills and management frameworks. Offices must be led by people who thrive in such complex systems; people who are adept at overcoming silos (through charm and through challenge), to work across disciplines and sectors to create shared value. Vice Presidents of CSR, Directors of Environmental Campaigns or Chief Information Officers at BT, RSPB or Leeds City Council may all still be necessary, but no longer sufficient: arise the post of tomorrow – the Chief Resilience Officer – someone as comfortable with strategising or stakeholder engagement as with a balance sheet or a scientific journal. Leading an office whose responsibilities entail ensuring that key leverage points in their organisation’s complex system – across a host of departments and disciplines – are fully utilised in support of its strategy.
So what does this mean for the UK Graduate Fairs of tomorrow? Well, another four years on, and who knows, by 2015 the post of Trainee Resilience Officer may just be many graduates’ dream job.
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Phillip,
It’s an interesting article, and there are a couple of points I’d like to pick up on.
We can never accurately predict the future, we can guess at trends. But we can equip ourselves for the future. Sustainable literacy is the key to this context. If we have graduates and young people with skills such as critical autonomy, creativity, the ability to apply knowledge and lead their own learning then regardless of changing contexts and knowledge, they will be able to adapt. On top of that, having basic employability skills that are sometimes missed during their HE and FE experiences. Skills such as effective presentation, project management, selling an idea and analysing behaviour. This is about maximising how they can change themselves, their community and their organisation to be more sustainable across the broadest definition (economic, social and ecological).
This is precisely what we are working towards at Change Agents UK, a national education and sustainability charity. We offer paid opportunities for graduates and young people to get experience in sustainability careers to break the ‘experience’ cycle, provide training on the skills I highlighted, and offer support to give them a platform. For the clients, our partners, it gets people in with fresh skills and hunger, the support to maximise their impact for positive change in the organisation, and having a flexible and cost effective way of resourcing sustainability projects.
From our point of view, it’s vital that during this period austerity and recession, that we recognise what skills are needed to take the country forward, and keep skills pathways open. There are a lot of passionate and talented graduates and young people out there wanting to apply themselves on sustainability issues, but fewer routes, fewer opportunities.
If they are turned away from these sectors, if the investment individually and as a nation in equipping them with start-of-the-art knowledge and skills is not utilised, and they work or volunteer in other sectors, we are losing latent capacity now and in the future. Resilience officers will need to begin journeys now. Cut their teeth and apply skills and knowledge in different scenarios to understand the linkages that make resilience such an important context. Vitally too, we’d be providing people with confidence and work-place maturity, so they can really be change agents.
If you are interested in discussing anything with us, our website is http://www.changeagents.org.uk, and our telephone is 01572 723419.