In recent
years I have been investigating environmental services in the US, with a
focus on their geographic patterns and trends over time. The sprawling
environmental sector is difficult to define. A scheme
I prefer puts environmental services into three categories of
professional service providers (this includes environmental consulting), environmental contractors, and
operations and management services with ten subcategories. These firms
vary tremendously in size from large corporations to boutique
operations. Much environmental work is carried out by divisions
within large engineering and contracting firms. Also, it is not
unusual for one firm to operate in several subcategories. I have
assembled a list of environmental firms in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
region that roughly follows this scheme.
As I have
researched environmental services, I have come across information that
may be of use to students interested in environmental employment. In
particular, as a perusal of our alumni pages shows, a fair number of
students from my department find work in environmental consulting.
This IBISWorld page
and Wikipedia article
have concise overviews of environmental consulting. John Jengo
provides the perspective of a practitioner and shows the actual nuts and
bolts of what an environmental consultant does. His article was
published in The Professional Geologist (Jan/Feb 2005): click here
and then go to page 53. The purpose of the 56
Stories blog is to give "insights from other recently hired
consultants – folks that were just like you not long ago, as well as a
peek into the activities of more experienced staffers." The
article by Jengo noted above addresses several ethical
concerns that consultants face, and this theme is taken on directly in
Kevin Doyle's Remake a Living: Consulting with the
Devil, published in the environmental portal grist. "So
You Need To Be a Consultant" by Richard MacLean about someone
wishing to make a transition from a firm to operating on their own shows
what's involved in the profession and should let newcomers to the field
know that consulting on your own is something you do in mid
career. Another
way of looking at environmental consultants is from the perspective of a
firm looking to select an environmental consulting firm for assistance
with an environmental project. Here's a short
piece from Pollution Engineering and another
from Long Island Business News.
The outlook
for environmental consulting had recently seemed quite positive.
For example, The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) forecasted growth
"much faster than average" for the field. The BLS does
not have a category called environmental consulting, instead its analysis of the field
is in the two categories of Management, Scientific, and Technical Consulting Services
and Environmental
Scientists and Hydrologists. Many environmental consulting
firms include GIS and mapping specialists, and the BLS forecasted growth much faster than
average for Surveyors, Cartographers, Photogrammetrists, and Surveying and Mapping Technicians.
These three reports contain much useful information in addition to
employment forecasts. The online magazine Environmental
Protection: Pollution and Waste Treatment Solutions for Environmental
Professionals has an annual unscientific but useful salary
survey that includes anecdotal analysis of trends. Finally,
here a link to an article about environmental management jobs pitched
towards the grads of four Master's programs with environmental foci: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/4/21/154539/284.
As of December
2008 the outlook has for environmental consulting has deteriorated
because of the downturn in the economy. Nevertheless,
environmental consulting will probably fare better than most other
sectors of the economy. For example, Money included
both environmental specialists and hydrologists in the top ten careers
in their May 2008 article, Best
careers to have in a recession. A President’s Council of
Economic Advisers report
from July 2009 discusses environmental occupations in some detail and
concludes that "the environmental-related occupations – which are
expected to experience tremendous growth over the next decade."
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