Our Trends Process: Step One – Find the Analyst

Our annual Sustainability Reporting Trends is born from six months of research, analysis and review, all of which kicks off with the hunt for our sustainability analyst.

“We send the job post to schools in December. Any later and we’d likely miss out on the quality of applicants we need,” says Wesley Gee, our Director of Sustainability. He’s been running our Trends research for the last six years and has seen incremental growth in candidates’ level of knowledge and experience year over year. “As more companies have started reporting on sustainability, students have caught on to it being a field where there are a lot of career opportunities.”

We Look Beyond Book Smarts

Schools like the University of Toronto, York University, Western University and the University of Waterloo are among those with sustainability programs that educate on the ethical and social governance policy and practices that our analysts need to know.

Applicants for our analyst position are often recent graduates with a degree in business, communications or CSR/sustainability and are expected to have a year of working or project-related experience in CSR/sustainability specifically. We also look for evidence of the time they’ve spent reading beyond the margins of their textbooks and whether they can differentiate between good and great sustainability reporting.

Aside from taking ownership of the research, the selected candidate will be working closely with our design team to critically evaluate results and identify best practice trends across more than 100 reports. As much work goes into evaluating the look and feel of a report as goes into determining whether or not a report effectively communicates its material issues.

Our chosen analyst will need to work closely with our internal creative team to judge and quantify the effectiveness of a report’s design – not just the quality of its disclosure.

A Virtuous Circle of Learning

And while their focus is on the Trends research, we encourage analysts to get to know the work that’s making its way through our studio and to seek out opportunities to present new and innovative ideas that might push us to evolve our own practices. A prospective analyst should be very confident in her or his ability to make a positive impact at The Works – as a creative thinker, a mindful doer and a valuable team player. “This working arrangement is as much for the analyst as it is for us,” adds Wesley. “We want them to finish the Trends work having taught us something new, too.”

In the coming weeks, we’ll get to work compiling our long list of leading sustainability reports for 2018. Think yours will have what it takes to make it into our survey? Send us a copy.