Environmental Career Center – Helping people work for a better environment since 1980

Enter the Partners Achieving Sustainability Excellence Corps, or PASE Corps. The PASE Corps recruits, screens, and trains top candidates to provide employers with the best employees on planet. Well, that’s not exactly true. The PASE Corps Associates are recruited and screened.  But they train themselves, and the goal is for PASE Corps Associates to be the best employees on planet Earth. So what is PASE Corps?  How does it work? And, what makes it different? 

What is the PASE Corps?

The Environmental Career Center conducted a survey of clients who employ professionals in the environmental, natural resources, sustainability, and green energy fields.  The survey revealed that the greatest challenge in filling positions was finding qualified candidates.  When asked to pretend that they had a fairy godmother who could grant them one wish to help in their recruitment efforts and make their job easier, employer responses included “prescreening” and “access to the right, qualified candidates.” In essence, employers want the best candidates to show up and start working.

Modeled after the Environmental Career Center’s environmental staffing program, the PASE Corps is training and staffing program built from a national network of motivated environmental professionals.  The PASE Corps provides individuals with an avenue for practical training in specialized skills while supplying employers with pre-screened, qualified professionals to complete projects within tight budgets.  The PASE Corps is comprised of:

• PASE   Corps   Coordinators
• PASE   Corps   Associates
• PASE   Corps   Mentors
• Client    Partners (Employers)

The Coordinators bring all the parties that make up the PASE Corps together.  The Associates bring an eagerness to expand their breadth and depth of knowledge, and increase their marketability to future employers.  The Mentors provide guidance to associates and bring their years of experience to client partner projects.  And the Client Partners supply the hands-on experience and get the benefit of a professionally executed project, completed economically.

How does it work?

Environmental employers, known in the PASE Corps as Client Partners, are repeatedly challenged to accomplish more with an already stretched budget.  The PASE Corps seeks to address this issue by providing employers with a way to complete projects, cost-effectively, with enthusiastic environmental professionals, otherwise PASE Corps Associates. 

PASE Corps Coordinators market the PASE Corps to local and regional employers for support in the way of short-term projects and/or funding.  Client partners can participate in the program by sponsoring PASE Corps meetings, facilitating training, or partnering with the PASE Corps on a project. 

In the case of projects, once a working relationship between the PASE Corps and the employer is established and a project or scope of work is fully defined, associates with complementary backgrounds and knowledge are selected to work on the assignment.  The PASE Corps recruits the top available professionals on a continuous basis to ensure that there is a pool of high quality associates available to environmental employers in the region or metro area.  Associates may be seasoned professionals who are changing careers, finishing their military service, or those who are re-entering the job market.  Other associates will be recent college graduates who have the energy, passion, and education to achieve great things for employers.

In addition to the associates, the PASE Corps also recruits PASE Corps Mentors to assist with training and/or projects.  Mentors include senior professionals and retirees who want to share their invaluable expertise and knowledge with the future generations of environmental professionals.  They not only bring their insight to the table, but also their passion to continue contributing to the environmental profession.

The associates and mentors then work together with guidance from the client to complete the project.  Through this process, associates gain the real, practical experience that employers are looking for in future employees.  In turn, clients not only get a completed project, but they can assess and evaluate the PASE Corps Associates work performance and “fitness” for their company culture and core business.  Ultimately the goal for associates is to become one of the best employees for the client partners.

What makes PASE Corps different?

Seeing, doing, and achieving.  Client partners and/or training sponsors provide the opportunity for hands-on, tangible experience via a project.  Self-motivated, ambitious environmental professionals and experienced mentors collectively pool their knowledge to tackle the job at hand.  The result is a project completed on-time and under budget for the employer and provision of real-world, marketable experience for the associates.  It helps individuals go beyond the lecture hall and apply that knowledge in a productive, career advancing way.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of the Green Careers Journal. For more information on PASE Corps or the Environmental Career Center, please feel free to contact us.