Role: Principal Consultant Energy & Carbon Management

Location: UK Flexible

Role ID: 2022-1690

Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world

Ricardo plc is a global strategic, environmental, and engineering consulting company, listed on the London Stock Exchange. With over 100 years of engineering excellence and employing close to 3,000 employees in more than 20 countries, we provide exceptional levels of expertise in delivering leading-edge and innovative cross-sector sustainable products and solutions. Every day, we enable our customers to solve the most complex and dynamic challenges to help achieve a safe and sustainable world.

Energy & Environment, one of Ricardo plc’s five operating business units, is a leader in sustainability consultancy, solving complex environmental challenges through industry-leading analysis, advice and data. With more than 40 years of heritage in addressing air quality, environmental and sustainability issues, our customers value us for our deep understanding and breadth of services covering the entire value chain from evidence, policy & strategy to implementation.

We are currently looking for an Energy & Carbon Management Principal Consultant to join our sustainability team.

Key Responsibilities 

We are seeking to recruit an experienced principal consultant to develop and implement net zero, and energy and carbon management strategies. Your ability to identify and develop opportunities which will raise the profile of the team and the services we provide is important, as is the ability to hold strategic conversations at a senior level including assessing needs, developing technical propositions and taking clients on their sustainability journey. As a result, you will most likely be working in a consultancy environment, possibly with experience working within a public or private sector organisation, a FTSE 250 company or a local authority and you will be well networked in the sustainability arena.

This is an exciting opportunity for the right person to really help to drive our business forward, building on an already highly successful delivery team.  We are looking for a professional and consultative individual looking to enhance their skills further within a rewarding and fast paced environmental consultancy business with the opportunity for excellent career growth.

The successful candidate will:

• Be capable of overseeing, managing and delivering net zero, and energy and carbon management projects.
• Be the client lead for key projects, demonstrating experience of working face-to-face with clients and managing their expectations.
• Undertake a project management role, controlling budgets and timings, and allocating tasks to colleagues as required.
• Liaise with specialist sub-contractors and build relationships internally and externally.
• Input technical expertise to lead energy and carbon management, net zero, and supply chain and scope 3 emissions bids.
• Ensure appropriate profile raising and marketing of Ricardo’s services and capabilities.

Ricardo operates a parallel ‘team leader’ system for pastoral staff management, meaning that you will not initially have any direct line management responsibilities. However, if such line management is of interest to you, we can help you to demonstrate and develop that capability.

Key competencies and experience

• Have practical career experience and be able to demonstrate relevant technical capability, effective project management and excellent communication skills.
• Have a higher education qualification (Bachelor’s Degree) in an environmental or engineering discipline, or otherwise to have a good track record working in an environmental role, so that you can demonstrate your knowledge.
• Ideally have experience of working in the consultancy sector, or organisational responsibility for the outputs from contracted consultants, to demonstrate that you have the necessary commercial awareness. We are also interested to talk to candidates currently performing environmental roles directly within industry especially where they have a strong commercial awareness.
• Demonstrate technical expertise and ability to lead across several of the following technical areas:
• Energy and carbon management planning and strategy
• Net Zero strategy development
• Scope 3
• Carbon footprinting and verification
• Energy data analysis
• Energy auditing and identification of energy saving and decarbonisation measures
• Knowledge of technical areas such as energy efficiency, renewable energy, sustainable transport, carbon sequestration and offsetting
• Knowledge of building energy performance / industrial processes
• Regulatory compliance, knowledge of both current and future environmental and energy related legislation

• Have demonstrated experience of working face-to-face with clients and managing their expectations.
• Experience of identifying and developing business opportunities.

Skills and behaviours

• Analytical skills with ability to identify, develop and implement solutions.
• Excellent writing skills to communicate clearly and without errors – accuracy and attention to detail are vital.
• Ability to review the work of more junior team members, providing constructive feedback and supporting development.
• Strong client and stakeholder communication skills (e.g. influencing, negotiation, presentation and relationship management skills).
• Ability to develop client propositions (e.g. understanding of client challenges and develop and propose suitable solutions).
• Project management skills that demonstrate ability to manage and account for time spent, and to deliver work on time and budget.
• Ability to build and lead teams; ability to coordinate and prioritise activities to ensure delivery of agreed targets.
• Ability to work autonomously and pro-actively.
• High level of computer literacy, including familiarity with the full Microsoft Office software suite.
• A flexible approach – able to see where help is needed and support colleagues as necessary.
• Be comfortable juggling a variety of tasks in a sometimes fast-paced operational environment.

Working here

Ricardo is an exciting and rewarding place to work and you have the opportunity to make a difference. You will work with teams of talented, dedicated, and supportive individuals. Alongside having a fantastic opportunity to develop your career with us through our broad range of projects, mentoring opportunities and a personalised approach to your learning and development. We are always keen to hear from people who have driven, ambition and a flair for innovative thinking.

Wellbeing and work life balance

We offer flexible approaches to work, whether that's working from home, being in the office, or as a hybrid worker. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. Wellbeing is at the core to our culture, allowing employees to flourish and to achieve their full potential. Our People are important to us, and we take pride in our wellbeing programmes and policies that support individuals including flexible working, carers policy, mental health first aiders and readily available support through our extensive Employee Assistance programme.

Diversity, Equality and Inclusion statement

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer, we believe in each person's potential, and we'll help you reach yours. We have an ambitious diversity, equality, and inclusion approach as explained here. We value diversity; recognising that a more diverse workforce creates a richer and more varied working environment. Diversity also drives innovation, by allowing us to offer our clients the best consultancy service that we can. As part of our commitment to engage positively and pro-actively with all our employees and ensure a culture of inclusivity, we are a recognised as a 'disability confident' employer.

Benefits

Our core benefits include 25 days' annual leave, plus 8 flexible bank holidays, a competitive company pension scheme, life assurance and professional subscriptions reimbursement. We also offer a wide range of flexible benefits to suit your lifestyle.

Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date.