Green Jobs: How To Make the Switch

Dr. Gelfer, Founder of Ecotopian Careers — a place that helps people transition to green jobs. But what are green jobs? What do you need to know about making the shift to a new green job? What are your next steps? We cover this and so much more, including online courses, career coaching, networking opportunities, industry insight, and tons of information on our guest's website: https://www.ecotopiancareers.com Course discount code: tbl15
  

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Transcript

Triple Bottom Line | Episode 32 | Joseph Gelfer |

[Upbeat theme music plays] 
Female Voice Over 
[00:03] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!

Taylor Martin 
[00:17] Welcome, everyone. So happy to have you here. We have Joseph Gelfer today. Mr. Gelfer is a member of the Climate Coaching Alliance. He’s also an En-ROADS Climate Ambassador. More importantly, he’s the founder of Ecotopian Careers. That is a place that helps people in mid-career transition to green jobs. Now, how does he do this? He does this by online courses, career coaching, network opportunities. They have a ton of information on their website, some of it which is free and accessible to you right now. Joseph, what was the genesis that made you start this new company?

Joseph Gelfer
[00:54] Okay, so like many services, they were born out of a personal need. I used to be a teacher in the university here in France, and before that in Australia. For years, I’ve been having conversations with students, and in fact, my own children as well, about how you should really be getting into climate, right? Climate is going to be the big thing for the next century. Don’t want to miss out on this issue. Just go and do it. I’m having this conversation year after year. Then I’m starting to think, well, why aren’t I getting into climate, right? I’ve got like 20, maybe even 30 years of career ahead of me, but it’s not so easy when you’re established in another career. You’ve got a reputation and a personal brand. I started looking around for is there some kind of service out there that helps people in mid-career switch over into the green economy? I was looking around and I couldn’t find anything. Then I thought maybe this is actually my role in the green economy. Maybe I should be providing some kind of resource that people can use that will help them make that transition in mid-career or mid-life or however you want to describe it. It really came out of a need for something that I wanted to have, couldn’t find it, so I made it myself.

Taylor Martin
[02:02] When was this that you started this business? How long ago was that?

Joseph Gelfer
[02:06] The idea started, originated a couple of years ago. It’s been about a year, a year and a half, to now been putting it into service. I started just exploring as to whether or not the idea was any good. I did that by reaching out to people on LinkedIn who I could see were trying to make those mid-career switches and getting some idea about whether or not it was just me or various other people who needed that service. Then from the other end as well started to have as many conversations as possible with green employers to see what their needs were. Then resoundingly from both sides of the equation, I got these positive feedbacks about, yes, this is absolutely the type of thing that we need.

Taylor Martin
[02:44] Let’s set the stage here. What do you consider a green job?

Joseph Gelfer
[02:49] That’s actually a really complicated question, right? What I’m going to do is I want to give you the official answer and then I’m going to tell you how problematic that answer is. There are various commonly accepted definitions out there. Here’s one from the International Labor Organization. They describe green jobs as decent jobs that contribute to preserve or restore the environment, whether that’s in traditional sections, such as manufacturing and construction, or in new emerging green sectors, such as renewable energy and energy efficiency. That sounds perfectly reasonable, but it’s very limited. For example, there’s nothing in there about waste and recycling, really. There’s nothing in there about food. There’s nothing in there about sustainability metrics. There’s all sorts of things that people might think of as a green job that aren’t really incorporated into that definition.

It gets more complicated still because there are some people out there who are trying to really expand the idea of what a green job means. I’ll give you an example. The Feminist Green New Deal Group, they are trying to incorporate care work into the scope of green jobs. They’re trying to expand it. Then from the other direction, you’ve got people who are trying to reduce it, typically people who are worried about corporate greenwashing and that type of stuff who are trying to be a little more rigorous about what we define as a green job. Between the fact that the official definitions are a little bit tight and don’t incorporate everything that people might imagine, the fact that you’ve got some people trying to expand it, some people trying to reduce it – actually, here’s another problem that you can layer over the top, the different types of nomenclature that people bring.

We’re talking right now about green jobs. There could be climate careers, sustainability jobs, environmental careers. Everybody has a slightly different kind of idea that they’re bringing to the table. We might have some loose ideas that are in commonality, but typically, I find that people have very different kind of – it really comes down to their domain expertise. Each little segment of the green economy has a slightly different thing about what it’s meaning, even a word like climate, right? This is worth just thinking about. I’ve got two communities in mind. In one community, the field of meaning around the word climate is stuff like tech, carbon, data, science. Then the other community I’ve got in mind, the field of meaning is like nature, ecology, psychology. Both of those meanings are kind of – they’re not wrong, but they’re both quite partial. What that means is that sometimes I think we can be talking across purposes, even when we’re using some of the most basic words in our conversation.

Taylor Martin
[05:28] Let’s use the term green jobs to encompass all those variations that you mentioned. How do you see the future of those “green jobs” becoming, from your point of view?

Joseph Gelfer
[05:41] All right, then there’s two answers to this as well. There’s the evidence-based answer. There’s always two types of answers, right? There’s the evidence-based answer and then there’s what I might describe as the visionary or speculative answer. We’ll go first with the evidence-based answer. If you look at something like the LinkedIn Global Green Skills Report that was published a few months back, they got some data in this report that tells us that the number of jobs that are requiring green skills are increasing year by year, but the number of people who are qualified to do those jobs are not keeping pace. At the moment, I think the gap is like 2%. When you look on the graph, they’ve got some nice linear graphs that show that gap expanding but at a steady predictable rate. The evidence-based is that the green economy is getting bigger at a steady pace. That’s what the facts will tell you, but here's the thing. I think these types of reports, the LinkedIn and the big four consultancies tend to publish, are somewhat limited in imagination. Because like many things, they don’t happen with linear progress. They happen with exponential change, right?

What I’m imagining is that the [06:53] early in on that exponential graph. Actually, one of the things I found really interesting, talking about LinkedIn, is deep in the bowels of one of these UN websites, there’s an interview with the CEO of LinkedIn. He says that he predicts that up to half of all jobs will be impacted by climate I think within 20 years or something like that. That was the first time I’d ever seen somebody in the serious world rather than the catastrophist world who started talking about numbers that felt sensible to me. That’s not meaning that half the jobs need to be green jobs, but at last half the jobs will be impacted by green issues, which is like on a continuum. My assumption is, yes, I agree with all of the conservatist estimates that the green economy is going to get bigger, but I think it’s going to get much, much bigger than people are anticipating. It’s going to happen much, much faster than people are thinking about.

Taylor Martin
[07:54] I align with you 100% there. Because my feeling from my perspective, I’ve always liked to watch trends that I’m interested in, and climate change is one of them. When you and I first connected, I was like, you do what? I was like, that’s awesome. There’s somebody out there like you do doing this, helping people transition to green jobs. Because from my point of view and what I read and my summation of everything, I agree with you. We are going to see a much larger transition to green jobs, or as you stated with the LinkedIn CEO, I think half the jobs in 20 years are going to be affected. I think it’s going to be a lot shorter of a window. I think it’s going to be within six years, or seven, or eight, maybe nine years. I think it’s going to – because every prediction that they put in terms of the climate changing has been so lofty, so far away, and every time they retest it, it’s moving faster than we think it is. We thought it was going to be this and now it’s really shorter. Then they do it again and it’s like, well, we thought it was going to be this and now it’s even shorter than that. I just keep hearing those – and maybe I’m reading the wrong papers or whatever, but that’s the way I see it. I see there being a lot of jobs being shifted or moved into a green space in some capacity. Let’s dig in. Let’s dive into it. What are some typically job switches that people do when they come to you?

Joseph Gelfer
[09:15] Generally, there are three types of switches that people talk about. These three types of switches were identified in Dawn Graham’s book Switchers, which if you’re looking for a good generic recommendation for career switches, that’s the one I’d go for, Dawn Graham’s Switchers. She proposed there’s these three types of switches. The first one is the easiest. That’s just called an industry switch. Let’s say, for example, that you’re a communications consultant in the finance industry. You switch industry and become a communications consultant in solar or some other segment of the green economy. That’s Number 1, the easiest, and that’s the one that most people go for because it’s the most intuitive.

Number 2 is described as the functional switch. Here you’re changing the type of thing that you do. Let’s say, again, you’re the communications consultant in a finance industry. Maybe you become the sustainability consultant in the finance industry. You take your industry knowledge and you’re changing the type of function. That could even be within the job that you’ve got. One of the little tips and tricks that I always get people to think about is are there any sustainability initiatives in your current job that you could volunteer for, right? Because that could actually start the process right now of bringing you into the green economy. You might not even need to switch jobs. You could potentially transform at least in part the job that you’ve already got. That’s Number 2.

Number 3 is called the double switch. That’s where you change both your function, your functional skills, and the industry. That’s the most challenging. It’s certainly doable, but it takes a little bit more initiative and a little bit more time. We’ve got three types of switches. There is actually a fourth. It’s called the stepping stone switch, which is basically if you wanted to do like one of these but it was just a little bit too hard, the gap between you and that dream job was just too big, you could take a halfway house. In some ways, like the functional switch is a little bit of a halfway house because it could be, well, I’m just going to try and take on board some sustainability or green themes within my current work, start building up some different expertise, but generally, those are the three switches that people pursue.

Taylor Martin
[11:24] Let’s get into more of those tips and tricks you mentioned. What are some tips and tricks to successfully transitioning to green jobs for people?

Joseph Gelfer
[11:31] The first thing, of course, is that you’ve got to have some kind of climate literacy. You need to know something about the green economy. One of the biggest, I think, myths that I feel compelled to debunk before I pursue this idea is that you need to be some huge expert. You don’t. You need an above average idea, but you don’t need to be a huge expert. One of the things that I like to do is to try and get people thinking about different types of climate literacy.

I’ve got a think called the four intelligences, which I describe in this process. We’ve got four types of climate literacy, right? Number 1 is climate IQ. That’s obviously intellectual knowledge. That’s stuff like science, data, the kind of stuff that you would learn on a university course. Then we’ve got climate EQ which is emotional intelligence. This is about understanding the types of psychological responses that people are having, the fact that people are generally moving through the five stages of grief in their acceptance of climate, this type of stuff. Then we’ve got climate AQ which is action intelligence. That can be a couple of things. it can be the stuff that you do in your lifestyle. Maybe you’re a vegetarian or you’ve got an electric car or something like that. It could be you’re an activist. It could be the activist activities that you’re pursuing in your day-to-day life. Then Number 4, climate CQ which I describe as commercial intelligence. That’s having an understanding about how you can monetize these issues, how you can turn them into a product or a service, or how you can most effectively get a job.

Now, what I find when people come and speak to me is that they’re generally strong in one of these domains and weaker in others. One of the first tips and tricks that I try and get people to do is to have a little audit or your kind of where you’re at across those four types of climate intelligence and try and beef up the weaker areas to have a little bit of a holistic take. In particular, you really need to bolster that commercial intelligence because a lot of people, particularly, they come to this idea from an activist mindset, right? They see climate change. They want to be part of the solution. What they’ve been doing to date usually involves signing signatures and going on protests and stuff like that. That’s nice, but it’s not going to work in terms of getting a job. You’ve really got to start selling into how the business models work in this context. How can we monetize climate change? What kind of products and services can be provided? When you get your mind in that space, then you’re going to start looking more compelling in job interviews.

Taylor Martin
[14:09] There seems to be like a self-reflection at the first part so that people understand what they do know and don’t know. Then if there’s things that they do need to know, then you help them acquire that skillset. Is that what I’m hearing?

Joseph Gelfer
[14:23] Yeah, it’s a little audit about where you’re at and then pointing people, in this first step, pointing people in the right direction of the types of knowledge that would be indicative. Now, of course, everybody is trying to plug into a different part of the green economy. It’s not like I’m teaching them you should know this about electric vehicles or you should know this about carbon capture. It’s really about surfacing the idea that there are these different types of knowledge, getting people understanding what they are, and then pointing people often to the right direction so that they can get a better grip on it. That’s just the first step, just getting a sense of where people are at with their climate literacy. Remember, you don’t need to be an expert. You just need to have, like I said, an above average understanding.

Taylor Martin
[15:09] I can imagine that some people might come to this and hear you talk about it and that sounds really reasonable from what you just said, but what about some misnomers that people may have when they engage with you? What are those like?

Joseph Gelfer
[15:22] Yeah, there are some that work on a large level and there are some that work on a small level. On a large level, people are assuming that you can’t really make career switches. No one is going to want me because I don’t have that type of background. That’s just not the case at all. One of the common themes that emerged out of the 60 or so interviews that I did with green employers when I was starting Ecotopian Careers up is this, without exception, encouragement on behalf of green employers that there’s a role for you. Depending on which part of the green economy you’re looking at, particularly the more mature aspects of the green economies, such as renewable energies, they need everybody. They need accountants, salespeople, communications people, branding people. There is a role for you. Some of it is that big high-level stuff.

Some of it, and this is the bit which I would like to really get people thinking about the most, and that is about personal energy. People have got this belief that their success in making this career switch is going to be something to do with their skills. Yes, that’s true to a certain extent, but I think the most important bit is to understand the mood, the vibe of the green economy and to be able to plug into it and to mirror it. What often happens is that people, particularly if they have come from a corporate environment or something like this, they’ve got a particular understanding about what success looks like. How do you make – get traction? They try and apply that into the green economy and they get hit really with like a surly silence because it just doesn’t work that way in the green economy. It’s more personable, more vulnerable. It’s warmer. It also wants people to have a real kind of infectious enthusiasm.

I often describe it as an evangelical zeal. In fact, I was on a webinar once with some climate take people, and only half, ironically, the guy who was leading the webinar said, “We’re doing the Lord’s work.” I thought, let that sink in. These people are literally on a mission. If you can think of the evangelical zeal or the people on a mission, it’s like bristling. It’s like energy that’s dripping out of people’s fingertips. If you don’t have that, then you just look kind of dead and flat. I used to have these soft skills, personal energy conversations towards the end of my coaching program as if it was an ad-on, but over time, I started bringing it up to the front. Because really, you need to be able to embody that type of energy right at the beginning when you’re starting to get to know people, when you’re going and having information interviews, when you’re deciding how you’re going to brand yourself as you’re positioning yourself in this type of job. That energy really needs to communicate right from the start. Now I’m bringing those kinds of softer skill and energy-based conversations right up to the beginning of the conversations that I’m having with clients.

Taylor Martin
[18:27] You’re making sure that you’re dedicated and making sure that they are focused and they’re ready for the task at hand.

Joseph Gelfer
[18:34] I generally think that people are dedicated. It’s not about whether or not they’re dedicated. It’s about whether or not that dedication is communicating externally. Some of this is about communication styles. Here’s a big difference, for example, between people who I work with in Europe and people who I work with in the United States. People in the United States are a little bit more outward and gregarious and they really communicate very easily what it is that they’re doing and their passion for it. It’s, to be honest, expected. If you go and have the same conversation with Europeans, it’s a little bit more muted. In fact, it looks a little bit [19:08] to start talking about with that kind of passion. It’s really about – I’m not questioning people’s dedication, rather making sure that their dedication communicates so that people just know that you are one of them. Because one of the challenges of being in a career switcher is that you need to kind of smooth off any points of friction. You need to have this kind of complete ease between you and the other person, total rapport. If there’s anything there that people are starting to feel a little bit uneasy about, consciously or unconsciously, that rapport starts breaking down. I think being able to understand the energy and the communication styles of the green economy is a crucial first step. Because if you don’t understand it, you won’t be able to mirror it. If you can’t mirror it, you’re going to cause yourself problems.

Taylor Martin
[19:59] Okay, so we’ve covered some interesting ground here. Let’s walk through a scenario here. We’ve talked about how the beginning stages of engagement with you, but let’s say I am a non-eco friendly energy sector employee and I want to move into the green energy sector. What are our first, second, third – you can do broad strokes here. I just want to go through the motions, if you will.

Joseph Gelfer
[20:22] Yeah, well, typically, the first kind of conversations are, am I mad? Is this even possible? People want some validation. Often the early conversations are about, okay, obviously, it’s the most natural thing in the world for you to want to get out of this job in oil or something and to get into something more sustainable. We go through a little validation process. Then people are starting to go, oh, people are going to think I’m a bad guy. Absolutely not, there’s actually very little judgment in the – there’s a lot of forgiveness in the green economy. People just want people on board. They don’t care where you come from. They just want bums on seats. That’s it. No problem. Then really, it’s about trying to figure out where do you fit into this green economy. I think people who are in the old fossil fuels are in one of the luckiest positions of any types of career switchers because almost all of the skills that they’ve got are very easily transferable into the green economy. That’s why they have no trouble. As long as they can connect with people via that energy and communication style, they have no trouble because there’s lots of the technical skills, lots of the infrastructure skills that are required in the old energy economy are going to be required in the new energy economy.

There are two groups of people that have typically an easy time. First one, energy, second, tech, because again, everything is tech-based. All the people who have been out there selling ads for Facebook and Google and stuff like that, they move over real easy as well. It gets a little bit more difficult for people who are in communications, content, stuff like that. There is a role for them, but those types of jobs are not quite so easy and then you have to start getting – you need to tell a more compelling story about what is your climate story, what is your career switch story. People don’t necessarily see the transferability of your skills in quite the way that they do with those kinds of more technical sectors. There is a role for everybody. If you’re going into renewables from the fossil fuel industry, you’d have no problem.

Once we’ve done that, then it comes down to looking at language, not just the way that you’re communicating like on Slack channels and information interviews, but the type of language that you’re using on CVs that there are some sustainability style bits of language that people are using that I encourage people to think about. Maybe even often people have not had a job interview for a really, really long time and they just need to be introduced to the basics about the way the world works now. Like application tracking software, for example, ATS, many people who have not applied for a job for a while don’t even know it exists. This is why a lot of their applications go into a black hole because they think that somehow the first person reading their CV is a person who can make contextual judgments. No, it’s a piece of software that just goes on keywords. You need to know how the ATS works in order just to even get in front of a real person. None of these things are particularly complicated, but if you’ve been out of the job scene for a long time, which many people on a mid-career switch have been, you need to, not go back to basics because the basics have changed so much over the years, but just getting a contemporary sense of how recruitment works today.

Taylor Martin
[23:53] Then they go through all those processes. You stylize the way they speak, the way they interact, the way they write. You get them to maybe look for other jobs, other employers if they’re not going up the ladder or sideways within their own company. What about your online courses? How does that play into all this?

Joseph Gelfer
[24:12] All right. In the past, I would go through one-on-one career coaching sessions with people. I used to find that my time would be divided into two parts. The first part was my traditional program which I would walk people through. That would take around half of our time. Then the other half of the time would be really getting into people’s issues, their individual obstacles. What I’ve done with the online course is to unpack that default program, stick it onto an online video course, and that does a couple of things. One, it reduces the cost of going through that default program quite significantly. This is one of the real challenges for the green economy is that giving people career coaching is not particularly cheap. There’s only a certain type of person who can go and sign up for it. If you’ve got it on an online course, the price comes down. You go to the online course and then you can go through all of the common factors that people have. Then ideally, if you can, you combine it with some one-on-one sessions as well and you can start dealing with any of the obstacles that people face.

People’s obstacles are different. Some people have a real hard time establishing focus about what it is that they actually want to do. Other people are really good at focus but are no good at planning what they’re going to do. Other people are great at planning but they’re not so great at staying motivated, staying on track with the plan. It’s really a case of we spend a little bit of time together figuring out where your weaknesses are, basically. Where do you need the support? Then when we have our one-on-one sessions together, that’s where we can focus our time and all of this stuff that everybody does that can just be unpacked into the online course.

Taylor Martin
[25:53] On your website, I also noticed that you had some information that was from green employers, information directly from them. Can you speak to that?

Joseph Gelfer
[26:01] Absolutely, so one of the things that I did when I started Ecotopian Careers was just start talking to green employers about what are your needs, what advice would you give, basically, to people who are in mid-career who wanted to transition into the green economy. I started collating a set of Q&As, quite short but quite succinct. In the end, I got a collection of around 60, maybe a little bit more, Q&As from people from different parts of the green economy. Everyone that’s tech people, renewable energy, all the way over to ecology and conservation, everything in between, 60 Q&As that are available on the website. If you go over onto the blog section and click the employer advice tag, you will get all of those Q&As for free. What you will find is a lot of validation, a lot of employers who are telling you that all of the things that you hoped were true, i.e., there is a place for me in the green economy, they are true. It’s not just the case of hearing one guy telling you his opinion. This is the opinion of 60 people who recruit, who are in that situation. Many of them have actually made exactly that mid-career switch themselves so they completely understand where you’re coming from. It’s just a nice simple way to get a little bit of validation and motivation that, yes, indeed, this is a perfectly doable path.

Taylor Martin
[27:30] Speaking about validation, how do you see the green economy in terms of job opportunities growing over the next two years, three years?

Joseph Gelfer
[27:41] All of the statistics point to the fact that we’re going to need more people, but in the short term, here’s what I think is a real golden opportunity. Right now, there’s not enough people. That gap, as we talked about within the LinkedIn Global Green Skills Report, is getting bigger. Now, the thing is at the moment, the university system is not caught up with that need. It’s getting better but it’s not caught up with it. I don’t think that the university system is going to be pumping out enough qualified people for a while. I recon it's going to be five, six, seven years, something like that, which means I think there is a golden opportunity right now, and it’s not going to last forever, but there’s a golden opportunity right now for people to make that kind of career switch without necessarily having the really recognized qualifications or the long history because there’s just not enough people to fill the roles. This depends on which part of the green economy you’re looking at.

Here’s a quick distinction I make for you. The more mature the sector of the green economy, such as like renewable energy, for example, the more problems they’ve got getting candidates. There’s just not enough qualified candidates. Now, when you get down into the really new parts of the green economy, stuff like climate finance, [28:57] capture, stuff like that, they don’t need that many people, and generally, they’ve got enough people to fill those roles. If you’re making a mid-career switch, it’s better to try and go towards those more mature parts of the green economy because they generally have more diverse roles and large numbers that have run out of qualified candidates for. I recon this window of opportunity won’t last forever where it will be relatively simple to sidestep without the qualifications. I think the university system and generally the training system will catch up sooner or later.

Taylor Martin
[29:33] Wow, okay. We covered a lot of ground. I mentioned that earlier. Now I keep thinking, okay, I had a question in the back of my mind. I was going to say what are some advice that you could give to people to get them to take their first steps looking into making the shift to a greener job, but we’ve covered so much ground. What have we not covered?

Joseph Gelfer
[29:52] I like to go through a little visioning exercise for people. This is something for people on the fence. What I’d like you to do is just imagine it’s like a holiday, so maybe it’s Christmas Day, or if you don’t do Christmas in your culture, maybe it’s something else, Hannukah or something. Let’s imagine it’s 20 or 30 years into the future and you are sat at the table and there’s maybe a dozen people around the table and you look to your right and there’s a young girl there. She’s about ten years old. We’re going to go through two possible scenarios. In the first scenario, this young girl, she looks up to you and you go, “Hey, what have you been doing at school this week?” She goes, well, she’s looking a bit angry. She goes, “Well, we’ve been learning about how everyone back in the 2020s knew that there were all of these problems and how, to be honest, you guys didn’t do anything. Now we’ve got all of these catastrophic problems and we’re really angry. Seeing that you asked, that’s what we’ve been doing. We’re feeling angry.” Then she just turns away in disgust. What I’d like you to do is to just have a sit for a few seconds of what it feels like to have had that exchange.

Then we just wind it back a little bit back to the beginning of the conversation. Here’s an alternative meal around the table. You look around to this young girl and you go, “Hey, what have you been doing this week in school?” She looks up to you and she’s quite energized. She says, “We’ve been learning about how you guys made all of this sacrifice back in the 2020s, about how you had the imagination to fix a problem that you didn’t necessarily cause, and how basically you changed the whole direction of civilization. Yeah, we know that we haven’t fixed climate change but we know that we’re also going in the right direction. We’re learning about how there’s a national holiday in 2030 set down to celebrate the work that you guys done. We just want to thank you. Thanks for all of the sacrifice that you’ve made.” Then have a think about what it feels like to have that conversation. Ultimately, you might feel that that was a bit of a false binary and that you’re not necessarily going to have to choose between those two conversations but I’m going to pushback and say, yes, you do. That is very likely the two situations that you need to – that you’re going to be faced with. Now, I’m predicting that most of you don’t feel very comfortable with, to be quite blunt, the shame of doing nothing and having to look that young girl in the eyes.

Now you’re going to bring that back into today. If you’ve got any conscious, you need to be centralizing being part of the solution in your life. Not just doing tiny little lifestyle changes, although I support all of that. You really need to be making it the main part of your working week. This is why I think green jobs are so fantastic because it enables us to operate at scale. It’s not just about doing your bit. It means that we can do a bit for yourself and then every other person whose work it touches, so you’re not doing one person or ten people. You might be doing hundreds, thousands. Some jobs might be doing millions. Even better is that you’re getting financially incentivized to do it. It’s just a win-win-win. I just love green jobs because they work at scale and they pay you. You couldn’t ask for anything more. There’s no other time in history that I can think of where something is the morally right thing to do. Number 2, it is creative, innovative, and interesting. Number 3, it can pay really well if you get the strategy right. I can’t think of any time in history where those three things have come together, but they have come together with green jobs. You’d be mad not to get involved.

Taylor Martin
[33:34] Yeah, to at least check it out to see what is available to you. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground in terms of steps to think about. I mean, that last visualization was pretty intense, I have to tell you. I could see some people having that situation, absolutely. I think there’s a lot to digest here in this podcast. I think it’s going to make a lot of people think about their career, their market sector, how good or bad it’s going, and if their company is doing enough or if they need to be a changemaker within their company and open up a new sustainability whatever title. I think that’s all great. I’m really blown away. I didn’t think we were going to cover this much in just a short window of time, but we have. What are some ways that people can reach out to you or follow you? I know we have the website.

Joseph Gelfer
[34:25] Yeah, the easiest thing is just to go to the website, to ecotopiancareers.com. I’d recommend everybody sign up for the free weekly newsletter. That newsletter usually has a significant number of free industry webinars listed on it that you can attend and start to learn about that energy and the vibe and the scene, start developing new different types of climate literacy. Also, when you sign up to that newsletter, you get the free e-book Ten Steps to Switching to a Green Job in Mid-Career, which is a useful little jumping off point for anybody who’s thinking about this. By all means, go connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m always quite active there. I also just do a free introductory 30-minute coaching session for anybody who wants to explore what coaching looks like or even just ask questions about the online course. I’m always available to have conversations with people.

Taylor Martin
[35:16] That’s awesome. There you have it, everyone. Sign up for the newsletter at ecotopiancareers.com and download their free e-book Ten Steps to Switching to a Green Job. Joseph, thank you so much for being on today’s show. Really enjoyed this conversation.

Joseph Gelfer
[35:31] Thank you, Taylor.

Taylor Martin
[35:32] All right. Over and out, everybody. 

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[35:35] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.
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