Environmental Consultant
What is environmental consulting? How do you know whether it is a good fit for a new career choice? Environmental consultants are people who help companies work in a variety of areas, such as water pollution, soil contamination, waste management, and air quality, and help them lower their environmental impact.
In order to succeed in such a career, you need to have a certain set of skills, competencies and knowledge so you could have a clear image of certain expectations and better understanding of your possibilities when it comes to making this career transition.
Job duties:
Duties of an environmental consultant range from conducting site assessments and identifying any site contamination to solving contamination problems by conferring with contractors, sub-contractors, and clients. You must be able to identify any potential sources of contamination in order to help prevent any adverse impacts on the wider and immediate environment. Maintain your current knowledge and update yourself on pertinent legislation, as well as the ways in which it can potentially impact your clients. To determine if the contamination exists in accordance with current legislation, you will need to use software-modeling packages.
Skills:
Environmental consulting requires skills in science, math, design, environmental economics, and engineering. Indeed, environmental consulting requires a strong background for developing your experience and knowledge. These skills are hard to gain once you find yourself out of a post-secondary environment, but are highly marketable. In order to become a good environmental consultant, you must be able to complete projects within a given budget and on time, prepare and present charts and graphs, have excellent research and data analysis skills, and know the latest environmental regulations and laws.
Education:
Typically, the minimum requirement for becoming an environmental consultant includes earning a Bachelor of Science degree in environmental engineering, environmental studies, environmental science, or some other closely related field. Coursework in environmental management, business, and communications can also be helpful in providing you with relevant skills, competencies, and knowledge to be the best possible environmental consultant. Employers in environmental consulting can explain the vision and mission of this career choice.
Know the latest environmental regulations and laws:
Knowledge of the latest regulations and laws is required from you, because your clients will count on you to keep everything compliant. As an environmental consultant, you will need to keep up with the latest updates and trends in the environmental sector. If this sounds interesting to you, then it is a great sign that environmental consulting may be a perfect career choice for you. It is certainly a great way to build your own strategic thinking skills.
Know how to analyze your data:
As an environmental consultant, you will be dealing with problems by conducting research, collecting data, and analyzing it in order to identify solutions and possible improvements. An environmental consultant needs to enjoy certain tasks such as sample collecting, solving a client’s problem, and creating spreadsheets to analyze data.
Manage to meet deadlines:
Completing projects on time and on budget is a trait that successful environmental consultants must have. In order to achieve this, you need to be able to multi-task, plan ahead, and be time-efficient. This may be the best choice of a career for someone who can work effectively under pressure.
Build your relationships:
To put it simply, environmental consultants essentially sell knowledge to others. This requires welldeveloped people skills from their side. Can you manage to work productively with others in order to find the best solution for any problem? Can you communicate effectively and manage conflicts? Good interpersonal relations and trust is what an environmental consultant should be able to instill in others.
On the other hand, you should be able to create professional end products, as well as reports and presentations. Do you know how to present important information to your clients in an easily understandable and well-written format? This can be critical for being a professional in a consulting environment.
All of this is required for a job entrance and being the first level consultant. As you gain more experience, you may be asked to take on more responsibility by managing small projects. If you are successful, you will advance to the position of a senior-level environmental consultant. This involves managing site investigations, other staff, the allocation of project resources, and contracts.
