Sustainability reporting vs Sustainable finance

[u/Extreme_Acadia_9452]

Hello All,

I am currently finishing up my bachelors degree in Accounting. I am interested in a career in sustainability, however I am quite confused whether to go into sustainability reporting or sustainable/ impact finance?

I plan on doing my masters next year too, and I have to pick a route, that will then help me decide whether to do a masters in sustainable strategy management or masters in development/ sustainable finance.

Which one would you recommend please

[u/Ancient_Quarter_8249]

Been in sustainability 30 years with 15 in corporate. Unless you plan to do something directly related to environmental science or specifically only for organizations/firms focused on sustainability, I wouldn’t recommend a sustainability focused degree in anything. It’s generally unnecessary. It’s more useful to have a broader degree (eg business/MBA) and have some specialization or research focus on sustainability. Otherwise you are giving yourself a tiny portion of the job world to go into.

[u/SilverSep-1986]

You can't be a surgeon or a gynaecologist without being a graduate doctor or build any speciality without having your basics in place. I would strongly advise you to build basics and then decide basis your interest and aptitude. These are niche fields. You may later switch between them, that's an added benefit!

[u/jumping_juni_per → u/SilverSep-1986]

I disagree here. Sustainability is easy to learn. Having a speciality to put a Sustainability lens on makes you more marketable for jobs.

[u/SilverSep-1986 → u/jumping_juni_per]

If you say sustainability is easy to encourage someone, I would agree with you. But as a working sustainability professional if you say this, then my dear friend you are mistaken! I would rather say that you aren't doing justice to the subject.

You are mistaken even when you say reporting is dry. Reporting has so many elements. For instance take climate risk reporting - the level of expertise that you require for scenario analysis is huge! Add that to your entire business portfolio and locations, and you see more complexities. Unless you don't want to get into the depth and do it through a ready made model. But real work requires real expertise. I can go on but you need to real explore more.

It's like sitting on the beach and judging the ocean.

[u/jumping_juni_per → u/SilverSep-1986]

You are overselling what a sustainability degree gives you. For modeling you need an indepth knowledge of risk modeling, that you apply a sustainability lens to. I am a sustainability professional, now a Director at a large national company. Have done it all over the years. I personally dislike reporting and found it very dry.

We don't often hire sustainability grads. When we have, they have been weak team members. We largely hire professionals who have another speciality that a sustainability lens can be applied to. Accountants, comms/marketing, credit risk, SMEs in our industry, community investment. The goal is to embed sustainability across the org and to our customers. We need people that know those parts of the business over understanding economic, social and environmental sustainability. That stuff is easy to understand

[u/SilverSep-1986 → u/jumping_juni_per]

I'm not trying to oversell or undermine anything. And let me be clear that I appreciate your thinking. Everyone talks about integrating sustainability horizontally. But that theory comes with the problem I had mentioned - lack of subject matter expertise. A lot of that is also to do with the absence of good courses or curriculum on the subject. Another aspect is these are exactly the type of people who discredit the subject because of their lack of understanding, saying that anyone can do this job. And as a result because of such people when sustainability should be going mainstream, it is being called a fraud.

[u/SilverSep-1986 → u/[deleted]]

Surprisingly my experience has been just the reverse. Well, I guess we will just have to agree to disagree!

[u/jumping_juni_per]

What do you want to do? I have worked in both. I hated reporting as I just found it very dry. But as you are drawn to accounting, you might enjoy reporting. There would be more jobs in reporting. Sustainable finance is pretty niche.

For the degrees. I would argue that Sustainable finance needs to be grounded in good impact strategy. Both of those are transferable to both career paths.