What brought you to this moment in your career where the Sustainability Excellence

Associate (SEA) made sense for you?

Since childhood, I’ve been interested in making personal choices that help mitigate negative impacts on people and our planet. As someone who was actively involved at summer camp over the years as a camper, leader-in-training, junior counselor, counselor and eventual camp ad-hoc board member, I have, over the years, been intimately connected to the importance and beauty of the natural world and believe that protecting and engaging with our planet is paramount to our sense of collective wellbeing. However, that said, the field of Sustainability as a profession is newer to me. Up until 3 years ago, my educational and professional background had been primarily related to areas of communication, project management and compliance, which lends well to my function within our corporate sustainability department. However, with Sustainability being such a broad and deep body of knowledge, it’s important that I grow my knowledge base in this area. While I’ve certainly learned a lot “on the job”, the steps I needed to take in order to earn the Sustainability Excellence Associate (SEA) credential offered me the structure and content to learn from a more academic perspective about the foundational concepts and strategies associated with corporate sustainability. It also provides credibility to my internal and external corporate stakeholders, validating my enhanced skillset with the

attainment of the SEA credential.

How are you putting the knowledge, skills, and ability demonstrated in the SEA to work

in your career (or work) today?

I demonstrate the competency needed to lead sustainability initiatives at my organization by communicating with key stakeholders to convey knowledge of internal and external Sustainability topics with the goal of improving customer engagement and existing services and processes. To this end, I am responsible for helping to build our brand reputation globally, while supporting compliance and sustainability performance. With enhanced subject matter knowledge, I am better at conducting research, gathering and analyzing data, and sharing insights and business intelligence to inform and engage internal and external stakeholders in advancing the company’s sustainability practice and position. These stakeholders can include customers, sales, supply management and vendors, product development, operations and communications, among others.

For those starting out in the sustainability field, what advice do you have for them?

As with all deep bodies of knowledge, some level of Imposter Syndrome - especially when starting out - can be typical. And with the field of Sustainability covering so many interconnected subtopic areas, the sheer scope of subject matter content can feel overwhelming. My best advice when it comes to this type of  fear and overwhelm, is to just keep leaning into learning opportunities and applying that knowledge to the best of your ability, recognizing that you don’t need to be a subject matter expert right from the starting line. Consistently learning small bits of information over time will lead to evolving subject matter expertise much more so than trying to digest too much information at once. Also, I’ve found that when I am clear with stakeholders on what I know as well as what I don’t know, I can level set expectations and mitigate Imposter Syndrome.

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