Why Conservation Needs More Than Conservationists with Dr. Nick Askew | Episode 89

Chris: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Parks and Restoration podcast. I am joined today by Nick Eskew, Dr. Nick Eskew from the UK. We are taking an international perspective on conservation and I am really looking forward to having this conversation. I actually, he and I have been talking for quite some time because I was just on his podcast and so we're recording these back to back but ⁓ Nick is the ⁓ founder and director of Conservation Careers. So we're going to jump right into that. Nick, welcome to the show. And ⁓ how did Conservation Careers come to be?

Nick: Hi Chris, yeah thanks for having me on your podcast. We're sort of changing hats aren't we, sort of guest to host, host to guest, which is really fun. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's nice to kind of, yeah, to be on your chat too. How do conservation careers come to be? I guess there's a few angles to that. One is without going into my career story, 15-ish years ago I was working in the Pacific. I was the Pacific Program Development Manager for an international partnership called the Birdlife International. Birdlife International is a partnership of conservation organizations working 120 countries around the globe with one NGO partner in each country. So Audubon National Audubon Society in the US and 119 others in 119 different countries. They're all working as one to conserve bird conservation, to conserve birds. And my job was working in the Pacific. I was out in Fiji and I was developing projects and programs across seven countries out there essentially. I've been out for a few years and I knew that I wanted to move back to the UK. It was a time of sort of personal change. Me and my wife were looking to start ⁓ a family and we wanted to come back to the UK. And I also knew that I had an entrepreneurial itch and something I wanted to kind of develop my own eco enterprise, as I call it, an organization that puts purpose ahead of profit, you know, an organization that stands on its own two feet. and really delivers kind of conservation action at a global scale. And when I was kind of exploring what that might look like, I was also looking to kind of back recruit for my job. So I was sort of leaving my job and I was looking for someone to kind of come in and kind of take over for my role. So I was using all the kind of the regular job boards that were available at the time. Yeah, advertising the role, which I thought was a great role for a great organisation doing interesting work. And I didn't feel like we were getting many applicants in. I was quite surprised. And I felt like the quality wasn't that great. It wasn't because there weren't people out there who could do my job. There were very many, but they weren't obviously hearing or finding the job. So I started thinking, well, obviously there's a niche here as an angle for a conservation and international conservation job board, just somewhere that shares jobs and to showcase the breadth and diversity of jobs that are out there globally. thought that's interesting. I'm interested in that idea. And it's an interesting kind of scalable online business where we sort of helping connect people with jobs. And I can see some impact in that. But then when I thought more deeply about it, I realized that actually that the problem many people are facing in their careers, particularly early in their careers, is kind of getting that first job. And it's more about careers advice and support and techniques and strategies that can help people to progress into a conservation career, whether you're a student or a graduate or or a switch, or we talk about these career transitioners, mid-career, or once you're in your career, how do you progress? How do you find impact? How do you become a great leader? We've just been talking about that on our previous chat. So the idea very quickly expanded out into much more, this is more about careers advice, of which jobs fits into that. And we have a busy job board, but it's much more about how do we support and serve and train people to be successful in their careers. to create a world where wildlife thrives and that's really our mission and our vision and that's sort where the seed came from and it started off then as a side hustle. I came back to the UK and I was working something like four days a week at Birdlife and one day on conservation crews and it became three and two and two and three and so forth until I transitioned fully into conservation crews after a year or so.

Chris: Wow, built it into a full-time gig in the course of a year.

Nick: Yeah, it may have been two, but yeah, was relatively quick and it was still jumping. It was still jumping with a bit of confidence and I hope this works out.

Chris: Right. Yeah, sometimes it just takes a big leap of faith. Yeah, very cool. how you end up in conservation in the first place? What is it that drew you to that? Obviously, you ⁓ got a passion for ⁓ birds and reading your bio. ⁓ I believe your ⁓ doctoral thesis was on owls. ⁓

Nick: Yeah

Chris: Yeah, so how, where did that come from and kind of give us the quick rundown of your education and career path that ended up with you working in the Pacific and then coming back to the UK to start conservation careers in the first place.

Nick: Yeah, yeah, I'll try and keep it brief. ⁓ Yeah, so I started, I think passion for conservation started really clearly as a child, as did yours. ⁓ ⁓ for me, it was all about fishing. Yeah, so I was quite a passionate fisherman, particularly in my years. spent a lot of time in riverbanks and lakesides trying to catch fish and... sometimes successfully, sometimes not. And I think what fishing does is it just immerses you in wildlife, in natural places, often beautiful places, often surrounded by birds and butterflies and plants and other things that are going on that kind of grab your attention. And I think quite quickly I realized that fishing really is just about being in nature and that's what it was. And I wanted to start to put names on the birds and the butterflies and the plants that I was seeing. So it became much more about just experiencing nature than just trying to catch fish. And so my, through the lens of fishing, kind of, yeah, connected me to nature more generally. And then I learned to drive a car and went to university and became quite a passionate bird watcher going out, you know, with binoculars on local reserves. And I remember one, particularly one evening really clearly that I was down in a nature reserve called the Lower Durant Valley, which is in the north of England, near York. had binoculars in my hand. It was just around dusk, seasonally flooding meadows, beautiful sort of grassland landscape next to a river. And I was just sort of scanning around at dusk and I looked down the river and there, actually filling my binocular vision was a barn owl flying towards me. And I almost, you know, sort of fell over. was so, I'd never seen a barn owl before. I'd only ever seen them in books. And there it was right in front of me, so close. I didn't need the binoculars. It was just there. And it just knocked me for six, like just the... The beauty of the bird was, even now I really connect to the emotion of it. It was unbelievable seeing that bird. yeah, the university I went to was just down the road from that. And whilst I was studying ecology at university for four years, a year in industry, I volunteered on that reserve. I became the chairman of the Conservation Volunteer Group. So every weekend I was out leading volunteer sessions on that reserve and others nearby. My best friend became the person who was the manager of that site. so alongside all that, evenings, weekends, I lived with him. We were out in the reserve all the time and realized that this local area that we were in was particularly important for barn owls. We had a really dense population, probably the most dense in the UK, possibly in Europe. We had a hundred pairs in quite a small area. And so we started thinking, why is this landscape so good for barn owls when they're in decline elsewhere, why are they thriving here? What can we learn about this population that we can apply elsewhere and share lessons around? So that became the focus of my PhD. Understanding the behavioral ecology of barn owls, following around, radio tracking them, ringing the chicks, trying to understand how they were using the landscape and what about the landscape was unique in helping to support such a healthy population. and then predicting where else we should be doing conservation measures and what they should be, where should we do habitats, should we do nest boxes and so forth. Long story short, that was like my academic career of which I loved. I came to the end of my university career and realized that academia wasn't really necessarily for me as much as I enjoyed it. I'm not a stats, I'm not a numbers man and you need to be strong at that side of it. I'm good in the field, but less with the maths. So... I then kind of moved through a few different careers outside of university. did ecological consultancy for a year or two, enjoyed the field work, didn't connect so strongly with the purpose. And we talked about that in our previous chat and I think that's really important. Some people may, for me, I didn't quite connect with the purpose of what I was doing. I then went and worked for Birdlife International and secured a role as their communications manager for about three years in their Cambridge office. And I just really enjoyed that. I enjoyed. telling stories about wildlife and particularly birds and birds from all over the world that were in decline or thriving, the conservation actions that the partners were doing. So I was writing news stories, press releases, managing the website, social media. Social media was just starting at that point. We sort of started the Facebook page and the Twitter page and everything else, you know, start to learn how you can use that. And that then led me into moving out to the Pacific to become the program manager out there really, which is much more of a fundraising role. Yeah, developing projects and raising the money that was needed. Wow.

Chris: Yeah. And as I say, the rest is history, Here you are. Yeah. Okay. Connecting and having that ripple effect in conservation careers. So I want to dig into, so this reserve that where you had this experience ⁓ seeing this owl and the binoculars, mean, I can visualize that, that had to have been an experience. So I know how parks and public lands work ⁓ here in Iowa and in the United States. Who is it that

Nick: But yeah, yeah.

Chris: provides and manages that preserve? How did you have access to it there? Is it a private thing? Is it a government-owned thing? Who is the owners or managers of that place?

Nick: Yeah, so the Lower Derwent Valley, is an area of floodplain alongside the River Derwent just outside of York, is managed in partnership with three or four different landowner types, you might say. So one is the farmers, yeah, who manage a lot of the meadows and own the land around the seasonally flooding plain, which is the National Nature Reserve itself. And then the... The designated reserve areas is managed really by two organizations. One is a county-based organization called the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, which is one of 50 different wildlife trusts that all come together under a Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts. We've got lots of wildlife trusts here in the UK that manage their local sites, which might be similar, might not, to how you work. know you're probably more government. And then there is the government side of it too, which at the time was called English Nature, is now called Natural England. And they are the government body that manages sites for nature. our civil servants. And then there's another piece of it, which is there is a private trust foundation. I'm not sure they're a company. They're more of a trust foundation that's been set up to manage pockets and to buy pockets of the area specifically to conserve wildlife. Yeah. So it's a partnership really between charities of which there are two or three different types, the government of which there's the national statutory body for wildlife conservation, Natural England, and we have the same in Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland. ⁓ And then there is the local landowners themselves, the farmers.

Chris: That's neat. That's very different system than what we have here. Usually anything. So is this reserve ⁓ open to the public?

Nick: Yes, areas are, yeah. So there's lots of bird hides and walks you can go on. You can go into the reserve and sort of watch the birds. ⁓ From sort of managed areas, most of it is fairly private there. Most of it you can't just wander across. Yeah, it's managed privately for the wildlife. So we have almost like a honeypot effect. There are places where if you want to go and see them, you can go see them here and here and here. But as a volunteer and as working with the manager, we had free access over the site. So that was very, very privileged. Yeah, very grateful for that.

Chris: Yeah, just the the thread that I'm following here is I recognize that there's there's different ways of providing access to places. And in so doing, you're providing opportunities for people to potentially have experiences. And you know, and as we talked when you and I talked on your show, part of what we do is as parks people here is, you know, and part of my motivation for doing what I do is providing those opportunities and those parks to make sure that people potentially have the opportunity to see that owl in the binoculars, which then that's them potentially on a course to then go into conservation or the areas that you were fishing. ⁓ Who is it that provided those that you had that opportunity? you're right, fishing or outdoor pursuits often are just an excuse to go out and experience nature. You know, go out and experience nature. You're to do what? Like, you know, we have this mindset, like we need to be doing something, like there's a reason for everything that we do. And I just want to go sit on the river today. ⁓ And so, you know, I just, I'm thinking about, you know, what does that look like over there? Because that is very different from here, but the end result was the same. You know, there, looks like it's it's much built deeper on partnerships. You know, if those landowners weren't participating, And if the different NGOs weren't participating and the government organization, if they didn't all work together, would those opportunities exist to not just conserve the species, but then provide those opportunities for the people that then get to interact with them? And I kind of find that fascinating of there's so many different angles and ways this can be done. But the end result is how do we come together to provide these places?

Nick: Yeah, when I was hearing about your story locally, Chris, like it did resonate quite strongly with my experience in the lower Doan actually, of actually, you know, connecting with local people, communities, schools, landowners, farmers, businesses, know, lots of people would get involved. We'd have walks and talks, we'd have volunteer days, we'd have whole kind of events over weekends as well, bringing people together, showcasing wildlife, and lots of ways to get involved. Yeah, and to build that participation in. And these are, you know, there's probably, I don't know, 20 or 30 or so villages around the area and they all, they were all proud of their landscape and their kids were kind of connected to what was going on and yeah, the university and local organizations as well. yeah, yeah, it's, there's a lot of crossover. It's the way you get things done, isn't it, in conservation is you can't do things on your own. And we talked also, you know, A lot of people, myself included, as you just heard, getting into conservation because we really care about wildlife. For me, it was birds and fish and fishing and bar-nails and so forth. But very quickly it became about people and how can we motivate and support and use the words like ripple effect with conservation careers. that's a really good way of saying what it is we're trying to do, actually, because I think I took the conscious decision 13, 14 years ago now that I can sort of do my own thing and I'm happy with what I was doing and... playing with where my impact might be? Is it locally in the lower Derwent with owls and owl boxes and nest box schemes and so forth? Or is it at a wider level with communications and raising awareness and sharing messages, which I knew was making a difference, but couldn't quite pinpoint what difference that was making. And wasn't quite connected to the impact as closely as I can touch it and taste it and feel it to fundraising where the impact for me was more tangible. I knew I helped to create this project. I knew it raised X thousand pounds or whatever. I can see how that project is now progressing on the ground and you as part of that chain of action, if you like, to conservation careers where it's like, well, I can do my own thing or I can help thousands of other people do that as well. And really it's more about connecting the right people to the right jobs and sort of setting them through and firing them up a little bit. Yeah. Because I can feel there's going be more impact in that. And I like that. Yeah. And the other reflection while I'm waffling. is I think through my career and others might reflect this too is like I really see cycles. You know, I'm 25 years in now and I sort of see that the cycles being often three or four years year one being learning. I'm new in the job. I'm a communications manager. I've never done this before. This is all new. This is all interesting, exciting. It's challenging. I'm learning. I'm getting better. Year two is I'm okay at this now. I feel quite comfortable and quite adept and yeah, I'm enjoying it still. And often year three is kind of, I've done this now. It's sort of getting a bit dry and a bit stale. Yeah. And I need a new challenge. And I think that's where my career has been. in the last, since I've sort of set conservation careers up, because I sort of do a bit of everything, the challenge is always there for me. And can sort of keep the challenge fresh with the directions we want to take and what it is we're doing at any one time. I've managed to sort of break that sigmoidal curve, if you like, into something new.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. You know, I like tying things back to or I like exploring ⁓ how phenomenons that we see. you talk about, you know, like the cycle ⁓ is there, is there some sort of universal truth to that? And, know, and there absolutely is in that, in that so many things in the natural world are cyclical. And

Nick: The food of Barnars, by the way, over here, it varies everywhere in the world. For us, it's often field vols and they cycle every three years. It's just like my career. Boom and bust, yeah.

Chris: ⁓ wow. Yeah. So it's almost like the universe was tying you right to that. ⁓ know, but ⁓ I like seeing these parallels because, you know, a lot of things in nature are cyclical and we see this in, you know, in the human world too. And so I wonder, like, I can't help but wonder, is that just a universal force?

Nick: I've never it before, yeah.

Chris: you know, like our ⁓ political cycles. Why did we choose four years or, you know, or two years or whatever they happened to be? Was that just arbitrary or is there some universal force pushing on us that like, well, this just feels natural. It just feels like about every two, three, four years, there ought to be a cycle shift here. And we often see that in the natural world. And so I almost wonder. Like if there aren't these invisible forces at play that influence us, we just don't know it yet. And I think there's a huge opportunity for further exploration in that. And maybe I'm just overthinking it, but I like looking at that. So there's two threads I want to pull on here. One, I want to dig into the success of conservation careers. But before I do that, I can't help but wonder. You did this research on the bar now as to why there's so many of them on that reserve there. What did you find? What were the genetic factors to why they were so successful there and then how that can be applied elsewhere?

Nick: Yeah, in its most simple form, barn owls require two things to thrive. I mean, they're one of the most widely distributed species of bird on the planet. You're going to have barn owls near you, for sure. And yeah, we have them all around the world and I've seen them in lots of different countries, you know, so, but they need two things. They need a place to, they need a place to breed. They need a nest site. And for that they want a really nice, quiet, dark, undisturbed cavity of some description. Nest boxes work well. We call them barn owls because they were traditionally nested in barns, in haystacks, in holes in trees. For us, oak and ash and species like that, where it breaks off and it carves out into a very deep hole. That's what they want. So they need an abundance of nest sites and then they need an abundance of food. And they tend to eat small mammals in Europe. Again, they can adapt to all sorts of things, but... For us, field voles would be the main part of the diet, but shrews and mice and rats and other things as well. And so they need both. And in the lower Doent, they had both and still have both. Yeah. So the seasonally flooding hay meadows provided a continuous stretch of relatively unmanaged grassland habitat that within which voles can thrive. And more importantly the interconnected ditches that then expand out into the landscape as well, the drainage ditches with the rough grass either side. There was a connected network there of vole habitat and a population that probably moved as the waters rose and receded every year but maintained a healthy population that the owls were hunting on. And then alongside that there was a good abundance of nest sites for the birds so there were lots of old trees with holes in. which naturally are being depleted from the landscape because they're not being replaced at the rate they've been lost. There were also quite a lot of old water towers in that landscape too, like tall brick buildings with the water tank at the back that had been unused for years and years and years, but the owls were often breeding in or behind them. And they were just naturally provided great nesting sites for the owls. So once you saw a water tower, I knew there'd be a barn owl, and you'd see them all over the place. Again, there's few in there. I'm talking 20 years ago, things have changed. And then there were lots of nest boxes. People have been putting nest boxes up and then myself and my partner in crime, Craig, who's been on my podcast recently, ⁓ put a lot of nest boxes along with other volunteers as well. So there must've, we've had 100 plus nest boxes in the area that helped the owls. And what we learned was, and when actually analyzed the habitat requirements of barn owls and then looked across the UK, say, where else is good? A lot of the UK is, is actually. from a habitat viewpoint, quite good for barn owls. What is often missing are the nest boxes and the nesting sites. That's what's been degraded and depleted. So a lot of conservation measures actually is about putting boxes up and maintaining and helping them through that. Yeah. And then briefly, like what else did we learn? Like I did quite a lot of like behavioral studies of ours too. So we put radio transmitters on and I watched them hunting, catching prey, what they were catching, where they were catching as they flew back, looking almost like the energetics of it. what they were delivering to the box and what they were choosing to eat when they were out and about. And what we saw, which is quite neat, is because they're like a central place forager, they've got to fly back to that central place, that nest site. And so they'd go out hunting and they would catch something wherever that might be. And they'd go out to about two and a half kilometers ish from the nest box. And if they went out to about, and numbers aren't fresh in my head, but something like 800 meters, if they caught, say, a small shrew, We have common shrews and pygmy shrews and water shrews in the UK. The smallest prey out from they're gonna get. They would deliver that back to their chicks as they did almost any prey. And then they would choose to then revisit that site. They'd go back to that point again, just to see if there's any more shrews. Yeah, and do it again. Beyond about 800 meters, they would never return back to that site for a shrew because the energy involved in flying all the way back and all the way back out again, it's not worth it just for another shrew. Yeah. And so you could plot out on a graph distance from nest with prey size and you get these sharp drop-offs. You return for shrews up to 800. You return for voles and mice about the same size to about something like one and a half kilometers, something like that. And then for something like a rat, a much bigger prey item, you might return up to say two kilometers, something like that. But there are thresholds at which you just don't bother. You just restart your process again. You start at the beginning and start working your way from the nest again. So like the energetics of like trying to understand the decisions the owl's making as it hunts was really fun to try to unpick.

Chris: That is fascinating. It's energy economics in wildlife. They recognize the law of diminishing returns and recognize this isn't worth the energy expenditure for the reduced payoff.

Nick: Yeah, that's Wow. you know, the home range, the territory is very small. defend a small territory. The home range is much wider. that really about two and a half K is about as far as they'll go because it's almost never worth energetically therefore flying for more than two and a half kilometers with a prey item. You might as just eat it yourself and keep going. And that's kind of what they do. But that's not, that is that determines the size, the size of their home range. It's just that energy pay off the trade-offs they're making as they hunt. Yeah.

Chris: And so I guess that would probably lend to ⁓ Nestbox density then too, as far as Nestbox spacing, you you want to make sure that you, you've gone toward those, those ranges would overlap then. I would assume.

Nick: Yeah, I again, they're not defending a territory. So you can have several nest boxes in a home range or several overlapping home ranges if you think about it like that. Our nest can be quite close to one another. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But how far they go is sort of two and a half K. And we try and we try to put like two boxes up in every one kilometer square. That was a sort of rough rule of thumb. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, there's a parallel with this. Here around here, we have done a lot of habitat management for Indiana bats, which are an endangered species here. And so we have found that their nightly foraging radius is, I think, usually average about two miles. And so the way we've done it is we've tried to, so we'll take areas where we know we have them, we've done acoustic monitoring where we find out we have them, and then we'll draw a two mile circle around there and say, okay, where's, Where's habitat that we could put in so that we would have overlapping circles on this radius so that we can start building this corridor on down. What we found is that we have ⁓ a creek, small river that runs through our county here. What we found is that they use this creek corridor a lot. And so we really tried to double down on creating the habitat along that creek corridor to make this continuous. And just like you say with the reserve, how that there was that connective connective tissue, you know, with the drainage dishes and stuff, and just how important that is. It doesn't necessarily mean that you've got to conserve an entire landscape. You just have to, you got to focus in on these corridors to make sure that things connect. I love hearing how there's, you know, it works for different species. That's really fascinating.

Nick: It's like a sort of broken link in a chain, isn't it? It just needs that link and then everything still works. Yeah.

Chris: So we'll shift gears here a little bit back to conservation careers. So ⁓ you have had a lot of folks ⁓ that you've impacted or connected with through that. You you said it was thousands of sunken to tune of, I don't remember what the number was seven. Give me your stats on the. the numbers of people that you have either connected with or assisted with through conservation careers and the time that you've been doing that.

Nick: Yeah, I guess it depends how you measure it. Yeah. So we've been around for, I think it's 13, 14 years. yeah, it might. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. About that. Yeah. And we, in terms of how many people hit our website every year as one stat, how many people we serve that way, it's about 1.2 million, something like that. We've had probably, we share around 50, 60,000 jobs per year globally as well. And yeah, we support lots of people in lots of different ways. So without going to any sort of sales pitch, you know, we have free membership levels that we support people through with free resources. Then we have paid membership levels, which gives people access to quite a busy community of people that we support with events and resources and networking and lots more. More and more in recent years, what we've been doubling down on is becoming more of a kind of training provider for conservation professionals, whether you're aspiring or professional. So because we know the job market really well, and we know what employers are looking for, we've been creating courses and trainings and finding leading experts in those topics to deliver them and support them to enable people to be more employable and more successful in their careers. So we've reviewed what employers are looking for, things like project management and design are really important across lots of different job types. Things like communications is really important skill set that employees are looking for. we've got trainings around that. Fundraising also really important. So those, we see those as kind of like pillar based skills that we've had trainings going for like five years now. And each training we had 500 plus people through something like that. And now more and more we're developing other trainings alongside that. So we have rewilding and marine and community based conservation, conservation science coming soon. do lots of like. application and interview skills as well and kind of bread and butter kind of career planning as well. Our vision I think that is missing in the sector that I'd like to see is clear career pathways for people into conservation and into the kind of diversity and breadth of careers that are out there. You if you wanted to be a banker or a lawyer or a doctor or a nurse or a teacher or whatever it might be a profession that people would you know recognize there's usually a quite a clear career path you should follow. You do this training and you do that and so forth and then you become the thing. Conservation doesn't and hasn't had that, you know, we've not had the pathways laid out. And so we're trying to, to provide that conservation crews. And that's the, that's the goal that we're moving towards as quickly as we can to help people who really want to dedicate their lives. We're not here to glorify it's a sector that everyone should be working in. It's just brilliant and perfect. And, know, come here, this is what it's like. We're here to be open, honest and transparent. And that's what our podcast is about. But if it does look right for you, we're here to help you navigate your career options, get clear as to which job is right for you. What do you want to help support? What's your why? And how are you going to go about doing it? What does your particular niche of interest look like? Then once you've got that clarity, like how are you going to bridge any gaps? How are you going to become really competitive and employable for those jobs? And then can we help to train and support you to work towards and secure that? that goal, that job that you're looking to get. And then once you're in that job, how can we help support you to be as good as you can be? Yeah. And thinking also about sort of leadership skills and work-life balance and wellbeing also within careers. So we're here to provide like a ⁓ holistic, yeah, career support community from early interest to thriving leader. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, I love that. And I'm thrilled that you've taken up that charge to do that. So having talked to employers from around the world, what ⁓ are they struggling with kind of universally? ⁓ My guess is I can guess, because it's probably the same that we struggle with over here. what are some of the common struggles that you see, that you're hearing from employers as to what they're not finding in the up and coming workforce? ⁓ And then maybe what have you seen from a gold picture of like what is unique maybe to certain areas or certain ⁓ disciplines within the world of conservation?

Nick: Yeah, good questions. What are employees struggling around? think, well, for a start, volume of applications. There's a lot of people that want to work in conservation. And the jobs, particularly entry-level jobs, can be quite competitive. So think early in the job hunt, where we support people quite a lot, it's really about getting clear and putting in really good quality applications once you're ready and making the hiring managers and the organizations on the other side of it, making their job really easy to see how you fit what they're looking for, how you're showcasing your experience, your evidence, your value, whatever you want to call it. And you're putting in good applications that just make it easy for them to invite you to interview and to understand who you are. So there's a tension there around the quality of applications and the volume of applications that employees are receiving during that kind of, yeah, the recruitment process ⁓ that we help and serve our audience with. I think in terms of like, applicants and what they're bringing to the sector and where organizations can somehow struggle. think there is a one is around the sort of softer skills when we look towards like early graduates, early career, less so for switches and transition as mid career, because they've already got probably half a career behind them. And they actually have examples and experiences and life skills that really translate often very well. And perhaps people don't understand how well they can translate into conservation and how much we need them. ⁓ But for people coming out of the university sector, you like, then academically they can be quite strong. But actually, and we've talked about this already today, it's the people skills, I think, that are really vital that can make the difference. And so, if people are thinking about what they can nurture in themselves, is, are you good in a team? Yeah, are you a good communicator? Can you handle conflict and so forth? It's almost like the relationship building skills. And then alongside that, I think also just like the professional skills about not just about how you manage a conservation project, but how do you manage you and your workload? think it's really important. How do you get work done? Yeah. Are you good at managing your timelines? Are you organized? you? Yeah. It's, it's those sort of professional skills that I think, you know, help the individual to thrive and, and, and help an organization to kind of bring stuff in that have impact. So I think there's, alongside the technical skills, is the kind of the professional skills. And again, that sort of shows where organizations I see and speak to, know, they are looking more more, particularly sort of mid-career and above. They're looking to hire from outside the conservation sector a little bit more than ever before. So particularly roles around like communications and marketing is a good example. know, we need more people. supporting conservation and action. We need to grow the sector, we need to grow our impact, we need to grow the finances in the sector and so forth, the amount of people that working in it. And it's faced all sorts of challenges in recent years. And one way to do that is to share better messages, connect more with target audiences and comms and marketing skills are so important in all of that, raising memberships, campaigns, appeals, whatever you want it to be. And the people with those skills are often not found in conservation. They're founding Pepsi and Virgin and so forth, you know. Right. Yeah. And they're often people have the skills and they actually have the passion as well and the purpose. They'd love to do it for conservation. It's sort of connecting those dots. so organizations are bringing in people and they have all sorts of amazing entrepreneurial commercial skills, which are really beneficial in this sector too, that can help us break beyond, you know, quite a charity based Yeah, the sector. A large portion sector is NGO charity based, which does amazing work. You know, and we all love the work that they've done. But also I do feel it's limited by how much money it can raise through donations and appeals. And there's a glass ceiling of trying to raise the planet on our spare change. I heard someone say, and I think that's a really good way of thinking about it. We need the charity sector. need to grow it. We need to be as brilliant as it is and get bigger. But I think we need other models, we need new financing models that are more commercial driven actually that deliver impacts for wildlife. And that's the other, I guess, tension. Yeah.

Chris: Yes. ⁓ I love this. it's fascinating that you bring this up. Again, universities throw me a bone here. ⁓ I'm going to have a conversation with ⁓ a it's called a great outdoors foundation. they're one of the I'll call it the biggest foundations are getting to be there on the path to ⁓ be a really big foundation here in Iowa. And ⁓ that is the approach that they're taking is that that You know, we're not going to meet our conservation goals on people's fair change. We need to bring in corporate sponsors and be thinking outside of this idea of, you know, the people, the conservationists, the people that graduated college with a conservation degree are going to be the ones that do it. No, I have a wildlife management degree. I am not a fundraiser. I'm not a marketing person. I'm not a salesperson. But I need that in my organization. So that would bring me to a question that would be applicable to those of us in this line of work. So let's say we see the value of this and we recognize, okay, we need to do a better job telling our story. We need to do a better job of mobilizing our customer base or just getting more people excited about what we do. And having wildlife people putting up Facebook posts or building a website is going to look like a wildlife person is managing a Facebook page and building a website.

Nick: I've done that many times, yeah.

Chris: Right? ⁓ And it's often what we get to do, because we have to be the jack of all trades and just do all this. How do we, as professionals, go to our leadership, whether it's the director or the board or the council or whatever it is, and make this case of look, or even just our industry for that matter, of look, we're a conservation organization, we're parks organization. We want to hire non-conservation people. We want to hire non-Parks people. How have you seen organizations successfully navigate that conversation? Because I could see how that goes sometimes. And I've seen this happen of, well, I mean, we're a conservation organization. We need to hire conservation people. They know what conservation is like. They're going to have the passion for conservation. Well, not necessarily. Right? And so how have you seen organizations navigate that? successfully or otherwise, or what would be your recommendation to those of us in this profession that maybe recognize the need to break out of our normal paradigm and expand our reach a little bit into folks that maybe they're not one of us, you know, that they didn't come from this background. Give me some insights on that.

Nick: Yeah. I think like the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result every time, isn't it? You know, and there's, there's something where we have to recognize that we are a global community of very like-minded, connected people all doing our best, but let's say we're failing, know, wildlife is in decline and it's not for want of our better efforts. So we need to find new ways of doing things at a bigger scale to have our impact and quickly. And I think. For that, we do need a more entrepreneurial approach to conservation. Yeah, so this idea of being agile and learning quickly and failing fast and adapting and evolving and learning, I think is really important and needs to be embedded in all organizations in a way in which people can thrive and enjoy and not be too fixed in our mindset. And I think bringing people in from outside in, from outside conservation, from wherever it might be, from corporates, will only help that to speed up actually. think that was, and so I do see most of the hires, most, but many, are in this more senior positions. And I think that will help actually sort of ripple down through the organization in terms of the cultural shift towards being more agile. Yeah. I think we need to, there's a few other pieces to this as I was listening to your question. One is think return on investment. It doesn't necessarily have to be like financial too, but like what's the return on this outlay to get more impact and to drive us more quickly towards our goals. Experiment with it. I suggest that we would have more impact by hiring the best people every time for the job in front of us. And that means often hiring from outside our organisation and not being scared of doing that. and having good hiring processes that kind of bring people in and are mission aligned and value aligned and are going to fit in so well. You talk brilliantly about seeing an organization like an ecosystem and I love that. And often like ecosystems, they can be missing like keystone species or whatever you want to call them. And we didn't even know the species was missing, but now it's here. Now the beaver's being returned or the wolf is back in Yellowstone or whatever it might be. Then suddenly everything thrives. And I think we don't know what we're missing by not hiring some of these kind of fresh thinking, different thinking individuals who just share the purpose. And that almost the disruption that comes with that can be a positive thing that we should embrace. And it doesn't even need to be a hire. It could be, you know, someone comes in to mentor or support from the outside, connecting NGOs to corporates and just like knowledge exchange. And yeah, and that sort of that, yeah. that sort of almost coaching from outside could be really beneficial for staff inside. It's not in any way saying that staff who are professional conservationists working for organizations aren't good enough. No, but there are benefits from bringing other people in or having support from others. I really like the idea of almost like job sharing or mentoring support from outside that could be zero cost and something that a corporate would want to do as a staff development opportunity for their staff to help other organizations, particularly even small charities to. grow their impact, sitting on the board of directors. There's lots of ways that you can help. That doesn't mean you need to be like a member of staff in a paid role, if you like. yeah, sorry, it's a bit of a kind of brain dump, but that's, yeah, ⁓ hopefully there's some value in that,

Chris: Yeah, no, that's why I like having these conversations is you can't just throw ideas around and then play around with some ideas. I live in the world of ideas. That's one of the reasons I keep the podcast going is it gives me an opportunity to talk to people with different ideas and different perspectives. So speaking of that, keep pulling on this thread a little bit. Let's say we can break our silos a little bit and bring someone in from the outside. bring, ⁓ you know, someone into the parks world that isn't traditionally a parks person, they come from a different industry. What would be your recommendation? What have you seen organizations do that helps integrate them? So it's not like you've got, you've got the parks people, and then you got this, this marketing person that you hired, or this, financial person that you hired that they're not really a parks person. They're not really a conservation person. And they end up feeling like the odd person out because you know, the like the conservation people or the parks people because they came from the parks background, they came up through the parks or conservation industry in their career and then you're bringing an outsider in. I can see that that breaking down pretty quick. What recommendations would you have for organizations that that will want to do that but do it in such a way or that you know want to bring these outsiders in to have these new perspectives and expertise and things that the parks conservation people don't, ⁓ but do so in a way that integrates them well into the team.

Nick: Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question. I'm not sure if I have examples of it being done well. I can think of my time at Birdlife where we brought people in and that was really beneficial. But I think in terms of general principles, if I can think about it from that direction, two things jumped to mind. I think one is like spending quality time together, like an immersing together, not being seen as here's a new person from outside is going to tell me what to do and boss me around and doesn't really get who I am and what I'm doing. That's not going to be useful at all. So I think there's an element of at the beginning of just going out and spending time. So if you're bringing in a new director of marketing or something, they should be out in the field with the volunteers and the staff and really understanding the organisation from the ground up. Like how does this work? Who are the people? What are the tensions? Where are the challenges? Yeah. What are we doing? How are we functioning? You need to go and visit the projects and see it and understand it. It was the same for me when I was writing stories about birds. I'd read stories, I'd look at stories, but when I got the few opportunities to go to the site and see it, it made all the difference. I understood it and the people and the context, and then that was the rocket fuel that meant I could go and talk about it more clearly and more passionately, but also I understood the staff on the ground and they understood me. And so I think there's an element of just spending time together and yeah, not just parachuting in with change in mind. I do think there's something around kind of the language that we use too in the communication in conservation. We and we use a different language to like commercial organizations and there needs to be kind of like a middle ground of like removing jargon and things that are quite exclusive and kind of put you as a trained conservationist or not, and actually being able to kind of talk on a level and again, spending time together is going to help there. And there's something also about attitude and mindset too, I think again, about coming in and at least being seen to come in to make change and to be the expert in quoted marks. think what we need more of is creative thinking and agility and ideas and experimentation. And that needs to be done in partnership, you know, with the existing staff and you need to be kind of brought into the ecosystem of the organization and not just to be the ideas person, you you need to be on listening mode. Yeah. And really integrating and then embedding that so you can, things can act quite quickly. There's some, I think there's something in that as well. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, I like that. And that's one of the things I teach is that one on one time, just being intentional about spending time together and getting to know the people around you as people and not just as an employee or as a coworker, being them, getting to know them as the person. And so doing, you kind of, you build that community, you build that tribe. within your organization and you get that, you get more cohesiveness that way.

Nick: Yeah, I guess it's that CEO concept of like the first hundred days type thing, isn't it? You've probably heard that. Yeah. And really the first period should just be about listening and watching and building relationships before any ideas or change come. Yeah. And I think that that doesn't necessarily just apply to a leader. That should be almost everyone. Whilst at the same time, the tension is we don't want to just keep doing things the same way they've always been done. Right. It's just about Yeah, gathering the ideas and saying, here's the opportunities. And I love that. Is it the Pareto principle, the 20 % of things you do that create 80 % of your impact, that 80-20 rule you see almost everywhere? Coming back to the maths that's shown throughout everything that we do, and the recurring things. I find that really useful. Standing back and saying, what is it that we're... doing it as an organization that really is moving the needles. Yeah, because the other stuff we can sort of just dial it down and just focusing on this and fresh perspective really helps with that.

Chris: Yeah. So you bring up a principle. ⁓ So there's also another principle called the, I think they call it the Peter principle. that's ⁓ people will get promoted to their level of incompetency. ⁓ And so, ⁓ you know, lot of conservation professionals get promoted into leadership without training. You know, we go to school, you know, I went to college and got a degree in wildlife. There was no leadership training in any of that. Yeah. As I rose up through the ranks, there was, you know, there was like these management courses you get sent to and they're just, you know, like teaching HR stuff. So what are you seeing as far as leadership development? What are some of the most successful things that organizations have done to develop up and coming leaders? You know, it's one thing to develop, say an intern that you got working for you for the summer to prepare them to get into a full-time job. Like that's, that's one thing. I talked about that a little bit, but how do you, how do you develop? leaders and what have you seen from organizations that you've worked with or companies that organizations that you know about that have done this well or or otherwise.

Nick: Yeah, we have our own called professional development program where we support kind of mid and senior level professionals and really what the basis of that I think is quite successful is it's kind of coaching led support for senior leaders. Yeah. And I say the mid career professionals too. So what, at the beginning of the career where really we started out at Conservation Career Support and the aspiring conservationist to get their first job. That was the tension, pain point that we were looking to really pick off. And really the goal there is shared and universally is, I want to get a job. How do I get that first job? But once you progress in your career and you have that first job, then the goals shift and they vary and they diversify for individuals. For some it's about like, do I manage the tensions within my team or conflict? How do I manage my work-life balance? Yeah, how do I not burn out? Yeah. How do I manage imposter syndrome and confidence at work? How do I manage staff and programs and budgets and resources and spreadsheets? There's a lot of diverse goals as you go up through your career. So therefore, support for these kind of more senior leaders needs to become much more personalized and bespoke to them individually. You know, think programs that really spend time understanding the individual needs and goals. What challenge are you facing personally? Where do you want to get to with those challenges in six or 12 months from now? How do you want things to change? What's the goal here? I'm really digging into that. And there might be things that sit underneath the surface in terms of beliefs and values and mindset that really need kind of working on. And a lot of the skills to help people through that. I believe sit in the kind of coaching sphere. Yeah, it's about helping people to really understand themselves around self-awareness. Yeah, and around kind of just realignment towards where it is they want to go and creating clarity for people as to how they might get there. And you can do that one-on-one as a coach and a coachee and that can work really well. Mentoring can help too. Coaching being mainly asking questions, mentoring being more about answering questions and giving advice. but it can work quite well in a group setting too. So we've explored that too. We have kind of group coaching as well in our professional development programme where we have six or eight people at a similar stage in their career and they do one-on-one with the coach but then they come together regularly as well as a group, as a cohort and they kind of do shared group coaching around themes that kind of come up regularly across everyone. And as much as anything like normalising it but also actually sharing ideas and support and accountability within those kind of mid-career leaders. to help them to kind of to stay on track and to realize they're not alone. Yeah, I think that's quite, I think it can be quite lonely when you get into more and more like senior management teams. Yeah, there's definitely something about connecting with other similar people and that comes back to the idea of connecting to people from outside the industry too. know, a CEO of a conservation organization should probably work quite closely with the CEO of a commercial organization and have that relationship where they can just soundboard and. get new fresh ideas that can help them and resources that can help them too.

Chris: Yeah, you're talking my language here. So what I'm hearing here is that it's not development of technical skills. It's development of relationships and it's development of, it's looking at the individual and taking a coaching and a mentorship and it's recognizing what's going to work for the individual in their development as a leader or as an upcomer and as someone who's going to rise into higher and higher ranks. And that's That's what's going to move us forward as an industry. That's what's going to allow us to be more effective going forward. It's not just more education necessarily in the technical sense. That's the whole core of the podcast that I do. is better leaders, parks, better conservation. So I want to start wrapping this up here. Where do you see the global conservation workforce headed in the next five years, 10 years maybe? What's the... What's the workforce trend that you're seeing and how can people inside, ⁓ so existing conservation professionals, how can we either, if it's something that's working against us, how can we help kind of correct course or if it's something that's going well, how can we expedite that process? What role can we play in improving the state of the global conservation workforce? in going forward, guess, broadly speaking.

Nick: Big question. Things that come to mind as I listen to that. One is I think we need to grow the movement. We need to diversify, have more impact. And the core part of that is how we raise finance. Like, you know, this isn't going to fund itself and we need to diversify. think we've shown over the last few years actually like being dependent on certain types of funding can be quite bad for the sector. doesn't build a lot of resilience into the organization and into what we're doing. I think roles that work more closely with business, roles where we are, even within NGOs and charities and the nonprofits are generating our own income. And so we can, at some level, grow beyond what we're currently doing. It's like additional funding, it's additional security and resilience. So again, commercial, entrepreneur, fundraising development skillsets, think I embedded pretty across the organization, but like specific skillsets themselves, I think are gonna be really important. So how can we create products and services that generate profit and generate purpose? If we can nail that one, we've got some growth. built into conservation. I think we need to keep playing and we are playing with that. There's lots going on that is very exciting, but we need more of that and more quickly. Yeah, I think that's one. And then the other side is like just, think, leveraging tech. Yeah, like for efficiencies of scale. So let the humans be as good as they can be at what humans are really good at in this industry. But we're generating more data than ever before. What can we do to use those data to give us real insights to help conserve nature more quickly and at scale? Does that mean AI with the ethics and the environmental concerns around that? Yeah, does that mean other types of tech that will allow us to grow more quickly? I think the other side of it as well, and it connects to the question of what gives hope in this industry too. is really about recognizing that nature's really good at restoring itself. rewilding's been and restoration's been a big movement over last 20 plus years. And there's so many projects and programs which are showing great success in quite short spaces of time. Get the conditions right. It might mean some interventions in the early days. But then in some ways sort of stepping back and letting nature take its course rather than trying to control it and direct it towards an outcome or a goal that we prescribed in perhaps a management plan or something. But actually just saying, we're just going to let this run and see where it goes. And I've found huge. mean, there's a project that many have heard of in the UK called NEP, the NEP estate, which used to be an intensive arable farmland. And it was inherited by a man who I've met a couple of times, Charlie Burrell. and his family and 20 years ago they decided that the model was broken, it wasn't working and they're going to just let the land go back to nature. it is now like turning back the clock thousands of years, like NEP is unbelievable and the species that have come back so quickly overnight is huge hope. it's sort of like less is more with rewilding and restoration, which is why it's so exciting. Again, going back to bird life, there's a bird called the turtle dove that we've got that travels between Europe and Africa each year. It's a migratory bird, a bit like the passenger pigeon probably was back in the day. Here in the UK, we've seen turtle doves decline and decline and decline. We used to them calling all the time at my wife's parents house. I've not heard them for 15 years now plus. And they face all sorts of threats across their migratory journey here in the UK, but also en route through hunting and... persecution and desertification in North Africa because of climate change and so forth. And so it almost felt a bit like a lost cause, if I'm honest. Like these species have got such a problem, how are we ever going to bring them back? Nep estate have, I don't know how many pairs, but I think it's something like, I'm going to get this wrong. I'm going to say 200 pairs, it's probably not. The number of birds at Nep is like a significant portion of the UK population in this small area. And I couldn't be more hopeful as result of that. shows that, you know, wildlife comes back. We can control it wherever you are. Even here in the UK for a migration bed like that, Bumpf, we can create an environment within which it can thrive. And it was really quick and it was relatively easy and it was relatively cheap. Yeah. And know, and NEP is a business, a thriving business. You can go on a safari, you can go in the back of a Jeep and they drive you around. can stay in... intense, you can go there and stay in beautiful glamping yurts and whatever. You can go field courses and training there as well. And, you know, it's a great example of what could be done.

Chris: ⁓ so where would we find more about that? said it's called NEP and NEP.

Nick: N.E.P.P. There's a book that was written by Charlie's wife. I've got it in front of me now. It's called Wilding. Very popular book. This is the story of the Nepistate. Yeah. And that is the total love on the cover. I was just talking about that. Yeah. Isabella Tree, Wilding it's called.

Chris: Alright.

Nick: And it tells the story of the Neffa state, but that's just one of so many different rewilding success stories now. Yellowstone being one in the States and yeah, many others.

Chris: Wow. Well, that definitely gives me some hope. We tend to fixate on the negative and we gloss over some of the positive. It's like, okay, we did that and we're onto the next challenge that we've got to tackle. And I feel oftentimes we don't pause long enough to recognize the successes. And certainly there have been some and what can we learn from those and then double down on that. That's fantastic. All right, so closing here, if you could give one piece of advice to someone ⁓ in their career, coming up through a career, that someone who is just looking to be a better leader, have a bigger impact in the world of conservation, what would be that? ⁓

Nick: how one recommendation for how someone could be a better leader that's a tough question Chris.

Chris: I need another question.

Nick: Yeah, I think there's a lot, a lot to be said for really understanding yourself. I think everything comes from a real understanding of yourself and reflecting on yourself about, know, what are you really good at? Personally, we all have different, this is kind of icky guy, but you know, what are your skills? Yeah. What are your superpowers? What are you great at doing? Layer on top of that, question of, you know, what do you love doing? Yeah. And where's the overlap in that Venn diagram? Some of us are great at stuff we hate doing, you you want to kind of focus in on the stuff that you really love and is your superpower, your unique combination of stuff that you're bringing to the world. We all have something different, which is great. And that's our strength. And then once you have that understanding and an understanding of your purpose, you your why, what it is you're trying to address in the world, what is going to get you out bed at... 4am on a Monday morning, if that's your job, what is your rocket power that's going to fire you up? Once you've got that, then you can really connect in quite an authentic and meaningful way with work in the world and with other people. Yeah. So it's about being authentic, but there's a bit of work to be done on understanding yourself, I think, in the first instance. And I find that work personally really fun and really interesting. And whenever I talk to others and do it with them as well through our programs and projects, then... It's so rewarding, but it does need a little bit of time because once you have that clarity as to who you are and what you're bringing to the world and your unique value, then it's just a case of sort of being let rip really, you know, it's about putting it into action. You can create a plan around that. You can figure out where it is you want to go with that. You can address and any gaps. You can be great at networking interviews and all the other stuff that is going to help you. But without the clarity in the beginning, you're a bit like a ship without a direction or a map. So yeah, I want a better word. yeah, understand yourself, think is really important. Do some self-reflection exercises.

Chris: That is fantastic. I like that. Yeah, because it connects you to the energy. I talk about this a lot on the show is what is it that you energy. And when you can identify that, then, like you said, you can let it rip. Now you can become unstoppable and you're not at the winds. What the world tells you, can do, you're on your own terms now. And the people that I have seen do that well have become so incredibly successful. And not just in the standard monetary income way, but just in a life satisfaction way. And that's really what it's all about.

Nick: Yeah, and success can mean so many different things. just, know you want to wrap up, but it connects to that idea of flow as well, really nicely, you know, in terms of an individual being in a state where they're just so immersed in what they're doing and they're so good at what they're doing. And you might be exhausted at the end of it, but you want to do it again tomorrow and time just flew by. you can find those moments in your life when you've had those flow states, and I hope we've all had a few. look at what are the recurring patterns, the golden thread that tie them together and that says something so deeply about you as a person and it's almost like the cheat sheet to get to something that is really important and really valuable and you should hold on to that thing and use it.

Chris: Absolutely. Yes, sage advice. Thank you so much. All right. So where can people go to learn more or connect with you?

Nick: Google Conservation Careers. You'll find us that way. We've got a website, conservation-careers.com. You'll find all our jobs. We have a busy membership as well, CC Pro, where people join our membership, gain access to all our jobs, a lot of amazing resources, a lot of community events. And we also have our CC Pass, which is our senior membership, which is more about trainings. You gain access to all our certified trainings of whichever, a dozen different programs now people can kind of go through at their own pace. with expert support. Yeah, and you'll find we're quite busy, particularly on LinkedIn. Yeah, we've got quite a lot going on there. And if this is going out quite soon, in a few weeks time, we're about to do a five day cover letter challenge on LinkedIn, Monday to Friday starting, I think it is Monday the 13th of April. I'm gonna go live every day at noon UK, and I'm gonna teach people across five days how to make a really good cover letter. Dead simple, step by step. 10, 20 minutes a day. Yeah, so if you wanna come up. come and watch and learn. Yeah, I'll be there helping.

Chris: Awesome. I certainly appreciate you doing that and the folks who tune into Conservation Careers podcast. think it's available on all the standard podcast platforms. yeah, well, thank you so much for your insight and for what you're doing for conservation across the world. This is fantastic. It's been so great talking to somebody that's got this international perspective. It's been a lot of fun and I'm sure we'll stay in touch in some capacity, maybe have follow-up conversations in the future.

Nick: I hope so. It's been really nice. Thank you again for letting me come on your podcast too. It's been wonderful. Thanks, Chris.

Chris: Absolutely, thank you. Take care.