Companies in Asia Pacific have been cutting back on junior-level sustainability talent as they tap into artificial intelligence (AI) to perform automatable functions such as sustainability reporting, according to a recruitment consultant.
Speaking at the ReThink conference in Hong Kong last week, Paddy Balfour, Asia Pacific managing director of recruitment firm Acre, said that corporates have been deploying AI to automate some tasks to improve efficiency, which has come at a cost to entry-level job prospects and career progression.
“We have been seeing more senior hires – and fewer junior hires,” said Balfour, whose firm services corporate sustainability departments across the region. “We are undoubedly seeing that,” he said.
His observation echoes a study by Bloomberg in July, which found that entry-level jobs are being squeezed by AI in many sectors as employers use AI-based tools to automate basic tasks.
This trend has exacerbated “massive talent pathway issues” in the sustainability sector, as junior and mid-level staff are deprived of the experience needed to progress their careers by doing labour-intensive but important jobs such as sustainability reporting, Balfour told Eco-Business on the sidelines of the event.
More needs to be done by industry and academe to incorporate mentorships into companies that would give graduates the requisite experience to progress their careers, he said.
Specialist, commercial skills in demand
The panel at ReThink was themed on attracting and retaining sustainability talent. Image: Robin Hicks / Eco-Business
As the sustainability sector matures, corporates are focusing less on capacity building and more on achieving “focused goals” Balfour said. This has meant a higher demand for specialist roles, such as biodiversity managers, as companies increasingly report their impacts on nature as well as climate.
At the c-suite level, there is now more pressure on chief sustainability officers (CSOs) to prove their commercial value to a business, Balfour said.
“There is a variety of different things CSOs are dealing with now: regulation, carbon markets, reporting – which all require diverse skillsets,” he said. These fast-evolving topics also require nimbleness, he said.
Balfour observed an end to the trend of consultants being hired by corporates to run sustainability departments, which he said at ReThink last year had been creating a gap in consulting expertise for companies to tap into. “That’s stopped,” he said.
But the recruiter noted that in order for sustainability to be taken more seriously at the corporate level in Asia, more sustainability professionals need to move into senior corporate roles. Vinamra Srivastava, Capitaland Investments’ sustainability and investment head, is a rare example in Asia.
“We’re not seeing many people, if any, transition from CSO to CEO,” he said. “As soon as you have sustainability professionals who bring a more holistic understanding to senior positions, who can bring genuine sustainability expertise, then I think we’ll then start to see more representation for sustainability at the very top,” he said.
Balfour’s comments come at a time when sustainability departments are under pressure to prove their value amid a tough economic climate and heightened scrutiny of environmental, social and governance (ESG) following the election of Donal Trump as United States President.
The sustainability chief for Hong Kong power firm CLP, Hendrik Rosenthal, told the Eco-Business Podcast recently that sustainability teams need to “stay practical” to maintain relevance in the current climate. John Haffner of real estate firm Hang Lung Properties acknowledged that sustainability teams face resistance in pushing the ESG agenda, but said the firm’s ambitions have remained unchanged.