Corporate Sustainability Management as an Emerging Profession – Insights From German Job Ads for Sustainability Managers (m/f/d)

The sustainability transformation is understood to be one of the great challenges of the 21st Century and businesses are believed to play an important role in pathing the way toward a sustainable future. Although more and more companies react to this by creating explicit positions for sustainability managers, little empirical research has been done on this emerging professional field. Hence, this article aims at investigating the tasks and duties of sustainability management in current business practice by performing a qualitative content analysis on task descriptions in job ads for sustainability managers (m/f/d) advertised by German commercial enterprises. As a result, a real type task portfolio for sustainability management as an emerging profession is reconstructed. This does not only help to paint a clearer picture on what sustainability managers are hired to do in current business practice, but also forms a central basis for discussing the relevance and role of transformative education in academic sustainability management training.