Green Career Central Blog

Green Career Tip: Investing in Conferences: 6 Ways to Get the Biggest Bang for Your Buck

Attending conferences is a powerful way to engage in your chosen industry. When professionals come together to discuss key issues, share emerging trends, and best practices, every attendee has an opportunity to stretch, grow, and deepen their own professional standing. This is true whether you are new to the industry or been engaged for years.
 
That’s the up side.

As you no doubt know, the price of admission is often the down side of using conferences to learn about your industry. With the registration fee, the travel costs, and food and lodging expenses, you’ve got to have a budget for such a strategy!

Tips for Cutting Costs
No matter where you are in your career, it always helps to keep several cost cutting strategies in mind.

• Housing options – Plan to share a hotel room with someone you know or see if the conference is arranging roommates. Look for a less expensive hotel in the area or explore options like AirBnB or online travel sites that allow you to pay less for open rooms close to the time of your conference.

• Travel scenarios – Play around with different travel options. Could you drive? Carpool? Can you reserve your flight early to capitalize on low pricing?

• Volunteer opportunities – Does the organization provide scholarships or waive fees for people who volunteer their time during the conference? It’s always worth asking this question.

• Virtual option - Review the website to determine whether the conference will stream one or more sessions online. More and more conferences are offering this option or they are moving to a virtual conference format for everyone.

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Green Career Tip: Are You Putting Your Credibility at Risk?

One of the best ways to “get a job” has always been to demonstrate your expertise. These days it’s not enough anymore to have deep knowledge of just your own industry. You must be able to see, discuss, and extrapolate how various issues impact your industry and vice versa.
 
Imagine you are in an interview, a conversation with an influential contact or a team meeting with your colleagues. The conversation suddenly shifts to the extreme weather that’s hit the region lately and whether it’s related to climate change. You are asked a specific question that requires a specific answer….

• Do you know how to respond?

• Is your response based on your opinion? On the party line? Or on science?

• What kind of impression will you leave as a result of your answer?

Will your response…

• Win you the job?

• Earn you the respect of your contact?

• Build your credibility within your team?

It’s for these reasons that I’m a firm believer that we must all have a broad science-based understanding of environmental issues and the tenets of sustainability.

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Follow the Clean Tech Green Money: DOE Makes $90 Million Loan Guarantee, Regen Energy Receives $5.5 Million, Getaround Raises $3.4 Million

The Department of Energy has finalized a loan guarantee of $90.6 million to Cogentrix of Alamosa, CO.  Cogentrix will build a 30 megawatt high concentration photo voltaic plant near the southern Colorado town.  When finished the plant will produce enough electricity to power 6,500 homes. 

Regen Energy, an innovative software company has raised $5.5 million from venture capitalists.  By using their software, companies can reduce their power costs of such items as lighting and air conditioning.  Based in Toronto, Regen will use some of the funding to expand into the U.S. with an office in San Diego, CA planned.

Getaround, a neighbor-to-neighbor car sharing agency has raised $3.4 million from venture capitalists.  Owners of cars rent their vehicle to members of the network by the minute or hour. Other network car rental agencies, such as Zipcar, own their fleet of vehicles from which members choose.

Solar-Paneled Highways You Can Drive On?

Solar Roadways Inc. recently announced that the company will be upgrading their parking lot in Sandpoint, Idaho. Not newsworthy? According to company founder Scott Brusaw, this ain’t no ordinary upgrade.

“Your parking lot could power your building,” Brusaw said.

Solar Roadways Inc. has received a second grant from the Federal Highway Administration to research the company’s “intelligent pavement” concept, or the idea that solar panels can be incorporated into our parking lots, streets and highways.

The first contract was awarded in 2009, and enabled the company to build prototypes of the technology. The second award is a $750,000 two-year contract that will be used to showcase the technology by transforming the company’s parking lot into a solar power system.

The panels are divided into three layers. The road surface layer is constructed with textured, translucent, high-strength glass material, embedded with LEDs, and contains a heating element.

 

The middle layer consists of a microprocessor board, support circuitry and controls for the heating element. The electronics are intended to control lighting, communications and monitoring, and are the intelligence behind the technology.

 

The base layer is responsible for distributing the power to connected homes and businesses.

Solar Roadways will install 12-foot-square panels – each producing about 7.6 kilowatt hours of power – in the parking lot outside their electronics laboratory. Four panels are enough to provide all the electricity needed for an average home.

 

Because vehicle traffic in parking lots is slow-moving, Brusaw sees them as the best place to test the technology, and the best areas to begin implementation on a large scale. Driveways, patios and playgrounds are other prime surface for the solar paver panels.

“The ultimate goal is the nation’s highways,” Brusaw said.

Paving roads and highways with solar panels has been Brusaw’s dream since he began the project five years ago. Brusaw envisions replacing asphalt’s fossil fuel technology with roads and highways that provide electricity, light their own signs and markings, melt snow, clean themselves and even communicate with drivers and law enforcement.

When asked about the cost of installing such a system, Brusaw emphasized that the true cost can only be measured when taking into account that the roads are not only a new kind of surfacing, but something that could effectually replace the nation’s entire electrical grid.

 

The lower 48 states contain 28,000 miles of paved surfaces. If installed with solar paver panels, enough power would be generated to provide three times as much energy as the entire country consumes each year.

Brusaw’s work has garnered attention from Japan, Korea and Canada, as well as from the Federal Highway Commission. The company won an award from General Electric’s Ecomagination Challenge, which challenged individuals and companies to come up with the “next generation power grid.” The company hopes to attract investors in order to start commercial production.

“Everyone is interested, but wants to know how you’re going to do this,” Brusaw said.

 

The company's new parking lot may show them how.

 

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Brittany Mauriss is an editor and solar leasing expert at GreenMarketing.tv, the green entrepreneur’s source for start-up ideas and industry insight. She also blogs over at CalFinder Solar.

Green Career Tip: What to Do When Your Experience Doesn’t Align with Your Target Green Position

All hiring managers are looking for the best candidate to fill their open positions.

“Best” means

• Having relevant work experience that’s current and demonstrates that you create results.

• Having the right knowledge and skills to perform the work without requiring a lot of ramp up time.

• Having experience working within the industry, with a particular kind of product or client, similar departments. Something that tells the employer that you’ll “get it” when you get on the job.

  In a perfect world, your resume will demonstrate to potential employers that you are the one they are looking for. You’ve got what it takes to get the job done effectively, efficiently, and enthusiastically.

In reality…you may discover that there’s a bit of a gap between whom you’ve been and who you want to become in this next role that you are targeting.

So the question is: How do you close this gap?

How do you connect the dots between the experience, knowledge and skills you do have and the experience, knowledge, and skills they say they are looking for?

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