Cultivate Professional Certificate: Personal sustainability for professional growth
Kelley Executive Education Programs now offers the Cultivate Professional Certificate, a professional certificate that fosters core competencies in sustainability for personal action and professional growth. The course is offered in partnership with the Kelley Institute for Environmental & Social Sustainability and TripleWin Advisory LLC.
Program description
Cultivate is a climate change and sustainability course providing context on how personal sustainability supports climate change mitigation, giving participants the knowledge and tools needed to live better and lighter on our shared planet. Through award-winning multimedia content, interactive exercises, and self-assessments, the course motivates and measures sustainable behavior change. The program supports action-taking by linking personal values to applicable sustainability measures, and employees who take the course will become confident in their ability to take meaningful action.
Upcoming dates and certificate overview
Course begins: September 10 Online sessions on Tuesday evenings at 7:30 p.m. ET Price: $2,750
This professional certificate program is best for...
Anyone who cares about climate change, biodiversity loss, and other pressing global challenges and wants to make a difference in any setting, but especially:
Mid-career managers and functional leaders for whom sustainability is an important but secondary aspect of their role
Non-sustainability executives and other leaders wanting to understand the links between individual behavior and organizational sustainability or to integrate sustainability into team culture and operations on a broad level
Siloed sustainability professionals wanting to broaden their knowledge or apply a “personal sustainability” lens to their work
Early-career professionals who are curious or aspire to become corporate sustainability practitioners
Chief sustainability officers, SVP/VPs of sustainability, CHROs, chief people officers, and total compensations/rewards officers
What you’ll learn
This course will walk you through eight categories of impact you can make.
You learn what successful behavior change is and how our everyday decisions are linked to climate change, human rights, and the social and environmental justice movements.
You’ll end the course with a custom-built sustainability action plan and your personal impact assessment report, showing an estimated reduction in your carbon and water footprints from actions taken during the course.
With new awareness and tools, you’ll walk away with the confidence to effect meaningful change in your personal life and the foundations for supporting and catalyzing change in your organization.
Program details
10-week course learning
Once a week, virtual, live sessions lasting 1 to 1.5 hours
Learn from subject matter expert lecturers or interviews with Q&A
Asynchronous learning for 2 to 3 hours per week
Total learning 30 to 45 hours
Curriculum
Discover what motivates you and how aligning with your personal values shapes which actions work best for you. Dive into what sustainability means, how it builds personal resilience and supports climate mitigation. Learn about adopting a growth mindset, an attitude of stubborn optimism, and sustainability behavior changes that last. Learn how to overcome mental barriers holding you back from living sustainably.
Transportation is one of the largest climate impact categories in our lives. This is an exciting topic area that is evolving quickly. Learn about emerging mobility and clean modes of transport, what Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is, and how micromobility may be our future. Explore measures that relate to your own life.
We all need energy to heat our homes and live our lives, but in this rapidly growing world, how can we minimize the carbon emissions caused by this necessary resource? You’ll learn how to differentiate between energy conservation and optimization, learn how to reduce your own consumption of energy, and build resilience to the extreme weather impacts and attendant challenges we already face. Learn what is possible around clean energy systems.
Food is integral to our lives, health, and happiness. It is also a critical pathway for successfully mitigating climate change. We’ll explore the different areas around food waste, consumption and our diet, and ways each of us can take actions that have little-to-no cost associated with them. Learn how simply a sustainable food mindset can be practiced at home and scaled to all types of businesses and organizations.
This module covers all of the items in our lives that we buy, consume, and ultimately throw away. We will take a deep dive into the world of clothing, fashion, and textiles. You will learn about chemical recycling, repurposing of textiles, and how our consumer-primed mind needs to be transformed into a sustainability-focused mindset.
In this module, we’ll investigate the trash in our lives and how we can value our waste. We will go beyond the 4Rs (refuse, reuse, reduce, recycle) and learn how the world is moving towards circular flows of valuable materials. You will get a taste of how to progress towards a zero-waste lifestyle. And we’ll focus on two waste areas of grave concern, plastic pollution and electronic waste, and how to reduce their negative impact in our lives and on the planet.
Water is life and essential to our survival. You will learn how climate change has dramatically impacted the quality and quantity of our planet’s most precious natural resource. We will critically review your usage of water and the sustainability measures that can dramatically impact your water footprint. You will learn about greywater reuse and meaningful ways to conserve potable water.
Whether you live in a large house, a tiny home, or an apartment, there are many ways large and small to reduce the negative impacts of your dwelling on climate change. You will learn to explain the difference between deconstruction and demolition and the value of each. Get inspired about how to move your home towards net zero carbon or simply a lower carbon emissions footprint.
Beyond our homes, the green spaces that surround and comfort us are vital to our health and happiness. In this module, we focus on food resilience, regenerative agriculture, and edible landscapes. Learn what you can do with a garden, balcony or even a spare strip of grass by the curb.
This is your lodestar moment—you are now equipped with the level of knowledge and understanding about climate change, consumerism, and your own individual impacts to make meaningful strides in your life around sustainability. In this final module, we remind ourselves that collective action and policy change are just as crucial as individual action for transitioning to a sustainable future that is accessible for all. We’ll look at how climate change, human rights, and sustainability are intimately intertwined.
Apply insights from this course to
Marketing and sales: Develop branded content and messaging that resonates with target stakeholders. Talk to customers and business partners with sensitivity to their needs and concerns.
Human resources: Understand and tap into the anxieties and values of Gen Zs and other emerging professionals. Create benefits and incentives that enhance employee recruitment, engagement, and retention.
R&D and innovation: Identify market needs and ideate new products, services, business models, and other solutions that address environmental challenges.
Purchasing, supply chain, and operations: Identify, prioritize, and recommend initiatives that are more effective for mitigating environmental impacts.
Executive leaders and other people managers: Connect with team members on issues they care about. Understand levers and best practices for successful behavior change. Integrate sustainability into workplace culture. Empower team members with their own knowledge and tools for taking action.
In addition to earning a professional certificate upon completion of this program, you will also earn a digital badge to showcase your skills on platforms like LinkedIn. These credentials show your network the concrete and in-demand skills you earned from taking this Kelley program.
“An overwhelming majority of Gen Z (76%) and 40% of Millennials state that climate change is their #1 top personal concern. By 2025, Millennials will account for 75% of the global workforce. These are your employees.”
Deloitte 2023 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, page 31
About TripleWin Advisory LLC
TripleWin Advisory is a boutique corporate consultancy focused on circularity solutions for industry. TripleWin offers a suite of tools to support companies in charting a practical, circular, and sustainable course for themselves. These tools include:
Carbon inventories
Setting science-based and net zero carbon goals
Materiality assessments
Sustainability roadmaps
Building circular business models supported by financial analysis
Risk scenario models using the TCFD framework
Workshops and courses to build employee agency and corporate competency
TripleWin Advisory is an approved climate change consultancy Accredited Service Provider (ASP) for CDP. The company is woman-founded, owned, and led; a public benefit company registered in the state of Oregon; and a federally certified Women Enterprise Business (WEB).
Questions?
Email us at keep@iu.edu to learn more about this and other professional certificate programs offered by the Kelley School of Business.
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