Where is the ESG field going? Try reviewing ESG job postings.

In a world full of confident and often political ESG pundits and bloviating annual sustainability reports, it’s very helpful to look at what companies are actually putting their hard-earned money into. Analyzing what kind of people companies are hiring in the Environmental, Social and Governance field is a great indicator of what the ESG profession and ESG field is currently doing and where it’s going.? If you have a stake in ESG, job postings can help you be more effective.? I used this job posting review technique for 25 years as President, board member and CEO of the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics. It allowed me to sort out the punditry and passion about the compliance and ethics field from the facts and helped me guide and inform the profession.

For this post I checked LinkedIn, CareerBuilder and Indeed.com for jobs in the United States that had ESG in the title or the job description.? As of October 5th, 2023 LinkedIn had 1,197 ESG jobs in the United States.? When using job postings as an indicator about what is going on in a profession or field of interest you should scan the job postings for false positives that would inflate the number.? I didn’t see too many false positives in this case. Indeed.com had 5,763 jobs with ESG in the job title or description and CareerBuilder had 4,078.

What is really interesting is some of the titles and description.? Wells Fargo is looking for an ESG Controller. I had never heard of that title before but reading the job description it looked like an ESG Director position to me. Another company was looking for a Compliance ESG and Privacy Associate which was interesting to me because I think combining these three areas is logical. I saw one ESG job focused on governance which seemed valuable because governance is often the lost stepchild of ESG.

When I first started looking at these job sites a couple years ago for ESG positions, I found that most of the ESG jobs were related to investment firms who wanted help analyzing companies for their ESG acumen to determine if they were worthy of investment.? Now the focus of ESG jobs seems to be helping companies improve their ESG program effectiveness and make the world a better place.

Another helpful search is for jobs that are very closely related to ESG but don’t have ESG in the job title or description.? For instance, searching on sustainability on CareerBuilder results in 99,393 jobs in the US, Indeed had 11,662 and there were 3,488 on LinkedIn.? CareerBuilder has 36,413 jobs with Corporate Social Responsibility in the title or job description. Again, false positives do occur.? The best way to get a feel for what is going on in a profession is scan a reasonable sample of the job descriptions. If you want to become well informed about where the ESG field is and is going I would spend time every few months at job sites to look for changes and trends.

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