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How can I get into Corporate Social Responsibility?
I would like to get involved with helping a company improve their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Do companies have specific people doing this - CSR officers or something? Where would I find CSR jobs and what qualifications/experience would be required?
Fabian Pattberg, CSR executive at energy supplier E.ON UK, answers:
Most big organisations will have people working in CSR. It may be a dedicated person, a team or a department and will depend on how big the organisations is and how embedded CSR is in its ethos. I work in a team of two and look at how E.ON can reduce its carbon footprint and its impact on climate change.
More and more universities are offering masters and even bachelors courses in CSR and if that’s what you want to do, it will give you a sound theoretical understanding of the issues involved. But the best way to get into CSR is to gain practical experience.
I came from a sales background and got my first break by doing an unpaid three-month internship at Futerra Sustainable Communications three years ago. It led to a full-time job and I found out about it through a Yahoo news group called CSR Blokes (CSR Chicks is the group for women). It’s got 8,000 members in total and is a global networking site where organisations post CSR jobs and internships.
It’s a good idea to get experience of working in a generic role for a charity, NGO or a government organisation, like Defra. Once you have experience there, it won’t be that hard to get into CSR as long as you can think outside the box. That’s not easy to do in a normal organisation but in CSR you have to be innovative and stick to your guns to persuade others to adopt good ethical business practices.
Paul Allen, author of Your Ethical Business, answers:
CSR is a multimillion pound business. Just look how many books about ethical accounting there are aimed at multinationals. Every FTSE 100 company will have someone working in CSR. But, although many small companies will be switched on to the fact that they need to be more sustainable, they don’t have the budget and time to employ people working in CSR roles.
However, cutting your teeth in a small company may be a way you can get into this field without having to re-train. Generally, you’ll be given a wider range of things to do and more decision-making power to make CSR objectives happen. Your Ethical Business shows smaller organisations how they can go through steps to be more sustainable and environmentally aware.
There are CSR courses out there and they’re worth doing but it’s also an idea to approach someone in a company that still needs to be persuaded about the benefit of CSR. Be persuasive and explain how, for example, re-thinking how they use the energy in their building could save them £50,000 a year. You’ll need strong diplomacy and communication skills to work in CSR because you’ll be talking to people in companies to change the way they work.
Your Ethical Business
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