Getting ahead in ecology: what many ecologists don’t know they don’t know…

by Ellie Benton-Best & Dr Kayleigh Fawcett Williams

Consultant ecologists face some unique challenges progressing their careers. We have been exploring some of these challenges in our recent survey. In this article, we share with you some of our findings.

How it all started

From conversations with friends and peers in a range of ecology roles we noticed patterns in the career progression challenges they faced. We wanted find out if this was unique to our circle or was universal within the sector. So, we set out to gather data (because we love data!) from a broad range of ecologists and employers/managers in the industry.

What we did

In 2019, we asked consultant ecologists to complete one of two surveys. The first was for ecologists up to senior level. We asked them about their personal experiences of development and learning, as well as career progression. The second survey was completed by managers/employers in ecology. In this group were those responsible for teams, hiring, budgets and project management. We asked them specifically about hiring, the skills they most look for on their teams, and what they think is missing.

As you can imagine, the results were really fascinating (well they are for someone like Ellie who is obsessed with people and behaviour!) and they gave us a great insight into what might be causing some of the issues we’ve noticed. These are the issues that can really get in the way of ecologists who are trying to grow their careers and could be stopping them from moving up to the next level or grade.

What we found

Respondents to our first survey, those working in the field of ecology with sufficient experience to progress, but who have not yet crossed into that ‘senior’ domain.

We had a great mix of respondents who work in organisations of all sizes – from individual contractors right up to people who work for the biggest multidisciplinary corporates. Of these, 78% said that career progression was on their mind at the moment. Unfortunately, 53% don’t think it is easy to progress.

When we asked this group about how progression, promotion or opportunities do arise in their workplace, we heard the usual answers around company structures and processes, and we also heard a lot of stories about the lack of transparency in companies, inconsistent ways of working and ‘the decisions being made by the higher ups’. What this suggests to us is that there are opportunities but that employees feel unable to decipher the ‘secret codes’ in order to get to where they really want to be.

It also came through loud and clear that people don’t understand what progression could mean for them, or another way of putting that is that people don’t see promotion as a good opportunity to carry on making a difference in and to the field of ecology; it is easy to get caught up in the politics of an organisation, and lose the focus on the habitats and wildlife, once you move up the corporate ladder.

This showed up very clearly when we asked what the barriers to promotion were:

Only 25% of this group thought that their skills were a barrier to promotion, followed by 38% who thought that their knowledge held them back. This didn’t really surprise us. Ecologists are generally passionate about their subject, love to learn and, in our experience, are generally pretty diligent at keeping up with growing their technical knowledge and skills. So, if knowledge & skills aren’t the main issues they think are holding them back, what are they?

Attributes (47%) or ‘Other’ reasons (50%) came up more often as what these ecologists saw as barriers to promotion. Comments in ‘other’ included cynicism about the way companies make decisions, through to awareness that what is needed to progress sometimes isn’t about ‘more knowledge of your topic’ but more awareness of how to do the business of doing business.

So what do the ‘Bosses’ say?

One of the huge gaps that our second group, the managers/employers in ecology, told us about had a lot to do with what they referred to as “non-technical skills”. This backed up the data from our first group, affirming that it is generally less likely to be their technical knowledge and skills that are creating career stagnation. These non-technical (or non-ecology!) skills included things like business acumen, project management and communications skills.

Conclusion

According to those leading ecology teams and making the key decisions around promotion, it is this set of “Non-Technical Skills” that are most needed in the ecology sector. However, the data shows that many ecologists place little-to-no value on these vital skills and their importance to progression is almost kept a secret. This we feel is the nub of the problem. There seems to a wide perception that these skills are either held or not held, rather than ones that can be taught and actively developed, just like learning anything new.

Would you like to learn more about our findings and how we can use this data to enable you to progress further and faster in your ecology career? We have so much more data we’d love to share with you & we’d love to dive deeper into the results of our survey and tell you more about our findings. Join us for our FREE WEBINAR followed by a FREE NETWORKING SESSION for Ecologists.