What are the career prospects for environmental professionals?
Short term – rather dismal; long term – excellent. The good job market for environmental professionals in the late 1980s and early 1990s produced a wave of students eager to enter the field. Regulatory stabilization, combined with consolidations and downsizing within industry, greeted the new graduates with bad news at the end of the decade. The word is beginning to filter back to campuses that EHS may not be a sure bet for a good position, especially in today’s gloomy economy. This current picture is based on anecdotal information, such as observations reported to me from colleagues in academia and industry. I witnessed it myself when I recently posted job openings on various web sites and received a flood of responses from extremely well-educated recent graduates located around the world. Middle and senior level EHS professionals have been particularly hard hit during the reorganizations over the past five years. My suspicion is that things may have reached rock bottom and an upturn
