Welcome to another edition of Climatebase Weekly.

This week, we’re featuring new climate jobs, events, and opportunities.

Plus, in the second edition of our new column The Work Ahead, climate workforce expert Daniel Hill asks 50 climate professionals: “What advice do you have for climate job seekers?”

Here’s a full overview of what we’re covering — keep scrolling dive into each:

⏩ The Work Ahead: We’re back with another edition of The Work Ahead, our recurring Climatebase feature focused on the career side of climate action, written by Daniel Hill.

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🏗️ Climatebase is hiring! — We’re excited to add three new roles to our growing team.

🌟 Featured climate jobs at 15+ new employers — Scroll down to view them all.

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Last week, we published a new blog highlighting some of the recent standout wins from graduates of the Climatebase Fellowship.

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By Daniel Hill.

“What advice do you have for someone who wants to work on climate?”

It’s one of the most common questions I hear from students, career switchers, and professionals trying to figure out their next move into climate work.

So to answer that question more valuably, I asked it directly to people doing the work.

Over the past year, I collected advice from 50 climate and sustainability professionals working across corporate sustainability, clean energy, policy, data, consulting, research, and advocacy. These weren’t polished thought-leadership quotes. They were candid reflections on what has actually helped them build and grow their own climate careers. 

When I looked across all of their responses, five clear themes emerged. Despite very different roles and paths, the same lessons kept coming up again and again.

What follows isn’t a checklist or a guaranteed formula. Climate careers aren’t that tidy. Instead, these are the five pieces of advice that showed up most consistently, paired with concrete ways you can start applying them in your own journey right now.

1. Treat learning as a core skill, not a phase

Climate work doesn’t reward static expertise. Regulations change. Technologies evolve. New frameworks, acronyms, and topics show up constantly. The people who thrive aren’t the ones who “figured it out” early and coasted, they’re the ones who never stopped learning.

That doesn’t mean trying to master everything. It means staying curious: reading reports, following policy shifts,taking a short course when a topic keeps resurfacing; and above all, asking questions when something doesn’t make sense.

Many professionals emphasized the importance of understanding how different parts of the climate system connect – energy, supply chains, finance, equity, policy – rather than staying locked in a single silo. Climate work increasingly lives at the intersections.

How to use this now:
Choose one area adjacent to your current skill set and go deeper over the next 30-60 days. Read what practitioners are reading. Follow how decisions get made. You don’t need breadth everywhere, but pay attention to what intersects with your area of focus. 

2. Relationships are the work

From the outside, climate work can look highly technical. On the inside, it’s deeply human.

Nearly everyone I heard from emphasized some version of this: progress happens through trust, collaboration, and relationships. That shows up in how teams work together, how companies engage suppliers, how policymakers interact with researchers, and how sustainability efforts move across organizations.

Networking came up often, but not in a transactional sense. The strongest advice focused on curiosity-driven conversations: informational interviews, conferences, volunteering, and community spaces where people are willing to share what they’re learning. Listening matters as much as talking.

Several professionals also stressed empathy. The need to understand the constraints others are operating under is critical, even when their incentives don’t perfectly align with climate goals.

How to use this now:
Start with conversations, not job applications. Reach out to a few people whose work you genuinely want to understand and ask how they got there. Focus on learning how the work actually happens. Those insights tend to unlock opportunities later.

3. Learn to translate, not just specialize

Yes, technical skills matter. Many professionals pointed to data analysis, carbon accounting, geospatial tools, financial modeling, engineering fundamentals, or policy expertise as important foundations.

But just as many emphasized something else: the ability to translate.

Climate professionals constantly move between worlds – turning data into decisions, science into strategy, and complexity into clarity for non-experts. Strong communication and project management skills came up repeatedly, especially the ability to explain why something matters to different audiences.

If you can connect climate work to business value, regulatory risk, operational reality, or public impact, you become far more effective, regardless of your formal role.

How to use this now:
Practice explaining your work without jargon. Try finishing the sentence “This matters because…” for three different audiences. Translation is a skill you can build long before you have a climate title.

4. Don’t wait for a perfect climate role

One of the most persistent myths about climate careers is that they start with a clearly labeled “climate job.” In reality, many professionals started elsewhere – finance, engineering, marketing, operations, research – and built toward climate over time.

Several people said this directly: stop waiting for the dream job. It probably doesn’t exist.

Instead, they looked for roles where they could build relevant skills, gain credibility, and create impact, even if climate wasn’t in the job title yet. Energy efficiency. Supply chains. Risk analysis. Product development. Reporting. These are all places where climate work is already happening.

How to use this now:
Look at your current role (or roles you’re targeting) and ask: Where does climate already show up here? Even a small project – tracking energy use, improving reporting, optimizing materials – can become proof that you know how to do the work.

5. Stay grounded in your “why,” but be patient

Finally, many professionals spoke candidly about mindset.

Climate work can be slow, bureaucratic, and, sometimes, politically charged. Progress often happens in increments, not breakthroughs. That’s why patience and self-trust came up so often.

You don’t need to be the loudest advocate or the most technical expert in the room. But you do need to stay engaged, keep building momentum, and remain connected to why this work matters to you.

Several people shared some version of the same reassurance: everyone is still figuring it out. This is a nascent field. The rules are still being written.

How to use this now:
Anchor yourself to a longer time horizon. Choose actions that build skills and credibility, even if they don’t pay off immediately. Climate careers are marathons, staying steady often matters more than moving fast.

Final thoughts

If there’s one thing this advice makes clear, it’s that climate careers aren’t discovered, they’re built.

Not through a single application or a perfectly labeled role, but through steady learning, authentic relationships, and a willingness to act before everything feels clear. The professionals who shared this advice didn’t follow identical paths, but they did share a pattern: they kept moving, kept learning, and kept translating their skills into impact.

You don’t need to have your climate career fully mapped out. You just need to take the next step with intention and keep going.

Check out some of the latest featured jobs below. If you don't see anything that speaks to you, you can always go to Climatebase to explore over 50,000 new climate jobs.

Resilience

“Leading the transition to a more resilient, sustainable, and just world”

Verdi

“Modern irrigation automation for every farm”

Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC)

“Championing clean energy and environmental justice in the South.”

Savanna Institute

“Advancing agroforestry for ecological resilience and climate stability in the Midwest.”

Tellus Markets

“Tellus bridges the gaps to enterprise decarbonization.”

Permanent

“Driving the transition to sustainable agriculture with a transparent, regenerative food marketplace.”

Kevala Inc

"Decarbonizing global energy with comprehensive, transparent data solutions."”

Watershed

“Empowering enterprises to measure, reduce, and report carbon emissions for significant climate impact.”

They are hiring across the following roles:

Eli Technologies

“Affordable electrification software to simplify climate-friendly home upgrades and decarbonization initiatives.”

Living Carbon

“Harnessing plants and biotech to combat climate change through carbon sequestration.”