Senior Sustainability Strategy Consultant

Permanent employee, Full-time · London

The role

We are looking for someone with practical experience, sustainability knowledge and thought leadership credentials, who can bring a clear point of view on current and emerging sustainability and social impact topics and provide clear strategic advice to our clients about the strategic choices they need to make. We need someone who can draw on their experience and knowledge to talk expansively and credibly about sustainability and social impact with the passion and behaviors to inspire teams, colleagues and clients.

This role will see you leading projects, running workshops, uncovering disruptive insights, engaging leaders and helping them to make clear strategic choices and also disruptive creative ideas for their business and brand. You will play a prominent role on our sustainability and social impact projects specifically, but as we are a dynamic and nimble agency with a fast-moving ideas culture, you will need to be comfortable stretching your skills and expertise across the full range of services that we offer across the definition, embedding and activation of purpose within businesses and brands.

You'll need to feel comfortable working on lots of different challenges at any one time. You might, for example be helping a client identify their overall sustainability strategy, setting related goals and targets and defining a roadmap of actions required to achieve these targets, or helping to embed broader purpose into a company culture and decision-making or playing a role in developing internal and external (customer-facing) communications, brand strategy or innovation.

As a senior sustainability strategy consultant you will need to have played a role and be comfortable with taking the lead on large client briefs, working closely with members of our Senior Leadership Team, Directors and Associate Directors with responsibility for setting the direction of the project, leading the thinking and having oversight of junior colleagues. We're a growing team, and we nurture our own talent, which means there’s scope to grow into a leadership position on the team if that’s what you’re after.

Day-to-day responsibilities

Strategic thinking and insight

● Lead strategic thinking on projects, supporting the team to produce quality, insightful, and relevant recommendations

● Bring a confident and well articulated perspective on projects, offering challenge and solutions to better our work and make clear strategic recommendations and creative solutions for our clients.

● Be able to apply sustainability and social impact expertise to projects, demonstrating in-depth knowledge of issue management, sustainability leadership and measurable impact strategies

Project delivery

● Lead and be responsible for all client facing deliverables, such as workshops, interviews, insight gathering tasks, presentations and strategic and creative outputs

● Create insightful and client ready outputs and give clear briefs to colleagues who contribute to and help shape our response to client challenges and briefs

● Play a leading role on large sustainability projects with minimal Director supervision

● Provide clear strategic support to clients on sustainability and social impact issues, being able to guide them in their decision making and provide context on the market and future trends

Managing client relationships

● Build strong, healthy relationships with clients and an understanding of their business

● Be a trusted point of contact for your clients’ projects

● Drive project profitability and account growth, ensuring projects are delivered with commercial success

Business development

● Help grow revenue by upselling to existing clients and sourcing new opportunities

● Lead and contribute to pitches and proposal writing

● Contribute to our thought leadership, offer development and IP development

Team and culture

● Play an active role in all areas of the strategy team and internal initiatives

● Share sustainability and social impact insights, new thinking and knowledge with the team

● Be comfortable in a fast-moving ideas culture

About you

You will bring deep understanding and experience in sustainability, ideally including time in a strategic consultancy, sustainability consultancy, marketing or innovation agency or client-side sustainability roles. As a subject matter expert, you should have the ability to provide high-level guidance to our clients on a range of sustainability issues - from resilient supply chains and labour rights to net zero carbon and engaging with sustainability subject matter experts on these issues. You’ll have a working knowledge of sustainability metrics and standards including SBTi, CSRD, GHG protocol and GRI, to name a few. You’ll be passionate about the role that businesses and brands can play in creating real-world change and have experience of delivering breakthrough sustainability strategies and social impact projects. Crucially, you’ll have a unique ability to translate your technical expertise into compelling insights and creative brand, communication and business innovation ideas that accelerate impact.

You will bring strategic skills, demonstrating that you are comfortable with the individual elements of sustainability strategies and roadmaps, comfortable not just in the technical aspects of analysis but going beyond that to advise clients on the strategic direction they take and proactively developing creative ideas for their business and brand. You will be comfortable leading projects with targeted guidance and support from Directors. Across the strategy team and within the agency as a whole, you will have the ambition to drive us forward and support the agency to grow and develop outside of client projects. This might include for example contributing to articles and thought leadership and offer development in the sustainability space.

You will have experience building client relationships, enjoy owning your work projects as well as working with and guiding more junior colleagues. We’re looking for someone who can demonstrate confidence in their own skills, recommend strategic solutions & creative ideas to the clients we work with, through a proactive, collaborative but hands on approach. You must be comfortable with project management, client relationships, managing commercials, delivering to project timelines and producing exceptional work. And, you’ll be excited to work in a creative, ideas culture, ideally with experience of working with creative teams to deliver brilliant creative ideas.

Recruitment process

Our first step will be a 45 minute interview with our Associate Strategy Director so you can understand more about the role and we can understand a bit more about you and why you’ve applied. Next, we’ll invite successful candidates to a second round interview where we will ask you to answer a short brief. This should only take a few hours of your time to prep and helps us understand how you would apply your knowledge and expertise to a particular challenge. The final round is usually a 30 minute meeting to answer any outstanding questions on either side.

For our people

● Hybrid working, with only one fixed day in the office a week

● We offer 26 days paid holiday per calendar year pro rata, plus public holidays. We also close the office between Christmas and New Year, which is in addition to your paid holiday allowance

● Company bonus scheme

● Pension Scheme with Aviva, eligible after passing your probation

● Health plan with SimplyHealth, eligible after passing your probation

● £100 working from home allowance to help your home office set up, eligible after passing your probation

● A tenure bonus reward after 3 and 6 years of employment

● Work from anywhere for 1 month of the year, after your first year of employment

● Access to our Given Campus for training and development needs

● Interest free season ticket loan and Bike to Work scheme

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About us

Given is the agency for purpose-driven brands. Everything that we do is about making brands a force for good, helping create positive change for people, communities and the world. Working with ambitious clients on the creation and execution of purpose, sustainable business strategies, innovation and creative campaigning and storytelling we are seeing the demand for the support that we can offer grow exponentially.

We offer great benefits, a collaborative and creative environment, impactful and meaningful work, brilliant career opportunities, and the chance to work with some of the biggest and best brands in the world. Our work has helped national and international brands like IKEA, John Lewis & Partners, Nespresso and Bupa, define and execute on their brand purpose. We fundamentally believe it takes both insightful strategy and imaginative creativity to change things for good, so we have both under the same East London roof.

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Join us. There's work to do.

The diverse mix of skills at Given powers the ambitious scope of our work.

Strategists that can stretch between business and brand disciplines. Creatives with ideas that change what companies do, not just what they say. Sustainability experts with a big imagination.

Given is growing and we're always interested in hearing from talented people who want to build a career with substance.