Sustainability & ESG: your new essential skillset

In this artlicle, SW Co-Founder, Karen Deignan, discusses Ibec Academy’s CPD Certificate in Corporate Sustainability & ESG, which is designed and delivered by SW and accredited by Technological University Dublin (TUD). She highlights why, for companies today, having employees who are knowledgable on ESG and sustainability issues is vital and how the Ibec Academy course is a great way for Irish professionals to quickly upskill in this area.

Being able to demonstrate robust environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials is becoming a must-have for business. This is why having a clear sustainability or ESG strategy in place is now mission critical for an organisation’s resilience and growth. Without doubt, the people who are best placed to implement and embed sustainability within a business and drive the transformation that’s needed are its employees. They understand the corporate strategy and business model, the clients/customers, the industry landscape, the innovation opportunities, the supply chain challenges, and so on. Add sustainability and ESG know-how to the mix and you have a recipe for success in terms of truly embedding sustainability principles into the way a business works.

As a consultant this might sound like I am doing myself out of a job! But in SustainabilityWorks, we firmly believe that working closely with our clients throughout the sustainability strategy development process (or whatever project we’re working on), educating and upskilling key employees from across the organisation as we go, is the most effective approach. In fact, in our experience, it is the only way to make sure change actually happens. That is why we’re very excited to be partnering with Ibec Academy on the design and delivery of this new CPD Certificate in Corporate Sustainability & ESG, accredited by TUD.

The subtitle of the course ‘From Strategy to Action’ captures the journey we will be bringing participants on over the four 1-day modules of the programme. They’ll start by learning about the business case for sustainability – the commercial drivers, risks and opportunities – and understanding key environmental, social and governance issues and the approaches businesses use to manage them. Then they’ll deep dive
into best practice sustainability strategy development, using their own business as a test case. Finally, they’ll learn about the practicalities of turning a sustainability strategy into action. Throughout the programme, mycolleagues and I from SustainabilityWorks will be drawing on our 20+ years’ experience of working with companies to design and deliver pioneering sustainability and ESG initiatives. We’ll be sharing our insights and advice, our do’s and don’ts and our top tips for success.

They say these days that ‘every job is a sustainability job’ and that is certainly true. Sustainability covers such a breadth of topics and is so all-encompassing that it touches on every department, every part of a business. This makes this Corporate Sustainability course applicable to anyone who has, or wants to have, a role in driving the biggest and most important corporate change agenda of our time.

Sound like you? What are you waiting for? Find out more and book your place here.