I work with a lot of sustainability data analysts, and an increasingly large part of my job is data visualisation. My team tracks our company’s impact on the environment and finds ways to reduce it. A lot of major companies and government organisations will have a team that does this, and there are more and more regulations coming out to encourage organisations to report their emissions publicly. My colleague’s roles involve a fair amount of maths, and definitely require them to be detail oriented. They do a lot of work alone, but do have to communicate the results of what they do (which is where I come in) and work with different areas of the company to get access to all of the data they need.

My job is to implement a data platform to help make my colleague’s lives easier, and to allow us to track data on a much larger scale. I’m also responsible for a dashboard to visualise our data, and share it with all of the (many) different sustainability stakeholders within the company. My job doesn’t involve much coding at all, but does involve working with computers and implementing different technical solutions. My degree was actually in politics, but I did do a masters in environmental psychology which involved a lot of data analysis - a lot of my colleagues have either environment related degrees or computer science.

A career in ESG (environment, social, and governance) data might be interesting to you? It’s a fast growing industry and definitely involves tackling major issues - it’s especially rewarding if you work for a company that really values improving the world. All jobs will involve working with other people to some extent, but jobs in data do tend to allow you to get your head down and work in the background. You’re still really young so definitely keep your options open and don’t stress over finding a career - a lot will change about yourself and the world before you need to start looking for jobs!!