Group Sustainability Data Analyst

Company Description

FasterForward is Informa’s approach to sustainable business.

Evolving out of Informa’s purpose of Championing the Specialist, we launched our new sustainability programme in March 2020. Through this FasterForward programme, we are embedding sustainability into everything we do and seizing opportunities from helping our customers and markets do the same.

Our ambitious FasterForward sustainability program sets us on a challenging pathway to being a zero carbon, zero waste business by 2030 and, perhaps most importantly, embedding relevant sustainability content inside all of our brands by 2025.  We believe this is key to creating a more sustainable society and growing our business from the opportunity to support millions of our customers find sustainable solutions to challenges in their own sectors.

Our consistent commitment and progress on sustainability have been recognised by a number of independent indices and awards, including an AAA MSCI rating and inclusion in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) World Index for the last 6 years.

The sustainability team in Informa

In the last eight years, Informa has invested significantly in sustainability, growing the team to 30 people spread across the business supported by 100s of sustainability champions. 

FasterForward is a collective responsibility across all of Informa but the Sustainability Team are the custodians and ambassadors of that work, providing subject matter expertise, leading best practice and creating more momentum.  Ultimately, we are responsible for ensuring that sustainability and responsible business practice is a competitive differentiator for Informa. 

The Group sustainability team within Global Support contains sustainability professionals who support the whole business, and it also links with other roles embedded within our divisions. This sits within the Corporate Communications and Investor Relations Team which includes external and internal communications, brand, and digital communications and investor relations. This group reports directly into the Director of Investor Relations, Communications and Brand who is a member of the Executive Management Team. We also have dotted lines connecting us with the CEOs of the divisions.

The team is close knit, collaborative and supportive with plenty of room for growth and learning as well as peer coaching.  With the fast-moving sustainability agenda, there’s always more we want to do as we seek to be a forerunner in sustainable events, publishing, data.

Our activities break down into three areas:

1. Working with product teams to make the delivery of our products more sustainable and support our customer markets do the same
2. Making Informa a better place to work through being a more responsible and sustainable business and enhancing our colleague value proposition, making life at Informa more engaging
3. Meeting and exceeding stakeholder expectations around reporting and compliance, as well as anticipating and preparing for future needs in a fast-moving agenda

Each of these activities involves effective collaboration and partnership with teams from across the business backed up by strong evidence. We work with hard data but also rely on more nuanced communication that’s tailored to our audiences.

Beyond delivering what’s needed for today, the team works to understand future opportunities and risks. We support the business in becoming a forward-looking enterprise and this always means choosing the most important priorities.

Job Description

Introduction

We’re now at a crucial point in our FasterForward journey and compliance with sustainability reporting requirements. To meet our targets by 2025, we need to ensure that we understand where we are and how we’re progressing against each of our sustainability goals and communicate this clearly to all our stakeholders (colleagues, customers, and investors).

With the growing importance of sustainability within Informa and amongst our customers and investors, we’re seeing a growing interest in our performance which is being seen in an increase in data requests from indices, rankings, investors, customers and others. This in turn is requiring increasing sophisticated data tracking systems, analysis of performance and targeting projects to improve how we are doing.

We’ve therefore created this role to offer someone the opportunity to join our growing team to help us meet these challenges and learn from experienced sustainability reporting and engagement professionals.

The Group Sustainability Data Analyst will report into the Group Sustainability & Reporting Manager, who in return reports into the Head of Sustainability.

Informa operates a balanced working model, with some home working and some office working.  Most of our sustainability team is based out of our London offices.  Our expectation is that the role would be hybrid working between home and office working, preferably in the UK, but other locations would be considered for the right candidate but with some required trips to our London office. 

Key Responsibilities

This role will primarily be working together with the Group Sustainability & Reporting Manager and the wider Sustainability team to support Informa’s sustainability reporting, including our annual sustainability report, our FasterForward commitments, submissions to a dozen indices such as CDP and DJSI, and obligations to comply with reporting schemes such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), the UK Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS), the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR), and other emerging regulations. It will also involve helping find ways to improve performance through special projects working with others in the business.

In particular, it will help us understand and meet the growing expectations from the investor community around sustainability and provide a bridge into the Investor Relations teams.

The role will engage heavily with Informa’s other teams including communications, compliance, HR, IT, events management and the wider sustainability functions, as well as teams from around the business.

The Group Sustainability Data Analyst is primarily responsible for:

• Supporting with Informa’s reporting and compliance obligations such as the Sustainability Report, Dow Jones Sustainable Index (DJSI), CDP, FTSE4Good, ESOS, SECR, CSRD, TCFD, TNFD and other programmes.
• Working with colleagues from across the business ranging from IT and privacy to compliance, H&S, HR and marketing, to gather groupwide non-financial KPIs environmental and social data, analyse it and report back to them and other stakeholders.
• Identifying and filling gaps in the data through resilient chasing and/or appropriate extrapolation.
• Calculating carbon footprint for use in our carbon neutral certifications for our company and products.
• Supporting with the collation of metrics such as economic impact assessments, social impact assessments
• Supporting with the preparation of our annual sustainability report including the design, selection of stories and designing appropriate ways of explaining out performance.
• Identifying ways to improve our approaches to data collection, reporting and performance such as the installation of new non-financial data reporting systems, use of tools such as PowerBI etc.
• Working with the group sustainability teams, as well as other teams such as finance, procurement etc, to identify routes to improving our performance.
• Build a relationship with the investor relations team and monitor developments and trends within the investor community for ESG related issues and expectations, as well as those emerging from leading customers.
• Supporting work with our procurement teams to engage with our largest suppliers on sustainable procurement.
• Supporting, and project managing where appropriate, on other projects such as our work on the UN SDGs, science-based targets, net zero, economic impact, etc.
• Provide support to Sustainability Team on ongoing projects such as research and analysis.

This list is not exhaustive and the right candidate is expected to be involved in a variety of other activities and engage with any other reasonable duties as required.  Each of these will be delivered in partnership with other sustainability team members.

Qualifications

Skills and Abilities

Essential skills

• A passion for robust data that allows consistent and insightful analysis as well as the tenacity and resilience to track down missing data, and the ability to accept gaps and extrapolations where necessary.
• Attention-to-detail and the ability to work to a high standard, while balancing a diverse workload effectively in order to meet key deadlines.  The candidate needs to be incredibly reliable with the ability to focus.
• Ability to perform analytical-related activities of large amounts of data and identify trends, as well as the actions to improve both the data collection and the performance.
• Intermediate to advanced Excel capability and ability to learn new technology platforms: in particular experience in data manipulation in Excel including PivotTables and analysis is essential.
• Experience working with incomplete data and extrapolating in an effective way.
• An ability to be an ambassador, particularly internally, to create ownership and extract information from other teams within the business, particularly HR ,compliance and privacy.
• Happy to manage own tasks responsibly and work independently, with little supervision but working within a common mission and an absolute ability to ‘catch the balls and run with them’.
• Flexible, proactive and collaborative attitude.
• Self-motivated, driven and open to new challenges.
• Analytical mindset and curious nature able to absorb detail and identify actionable insights.
• Demonstrated interest in Sustainability and making an impact in the world is absolutely key.
• Good communication skills in English.

Desirable skills

• Prior experience in a role focusing on financial or sustainability data is preferable.  This role might be well suited to someone looking to transition from a finance or analytics role into sustainability, or someone new into sustainability who has a real interest in data and analysis.
• An understanding of corporate sustainability reporting across a variety of ESG topics.
• Experience in tools such as PowerBI or other data analysis or presentation tools.
• Ability to communicate effectively with individuals at all levels.
• Project management experience.

Additional Information

What’s in it for you

Informa is a rapidly growing FTSE100 business with a newly developed Purpose, a strong desire to connect colleagues together and a dynamic and fast paced atmosphere.

The role involves working on projects that are essential to Informa’s success and the perception of our business by our stakeholders, both internal and external.

You will be based in the Sustainability team, a busy team that’s trying to support Informa change the way it does business, and the Communications team who are trying to foster Informa’s culture within our guiding principles.

Informa operates a balanced working model. Depending on the Senior Manager’s location in proximity to Informa offices, a work from home model may be considered or a hybrid of home and office work. The majority of our sustainability team is based out of our London offices but we have colleagues in Shanghai and Florida. 

This role may also be available on a flexible working or part time basis – please ask the Talent Acquisition team for more information. 

Alongside a competitive salary, Informa also offers the following employee benefits:  

We know that sometimes the 'perfect candidate' doesn't exist, and that people can be put off applying for a job if they don't fit all the requirements. If you're excited about working for us and have most of the skills or experience we're looking for, please go ahead and apply. You could be just what we need! We believe strongly in the value of diversity and creating supportive, inclusive environments where our colleagues can succeed. As such, Informa is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, ancestry, national origin, religion, or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, citizenship, or other protected characteristics under local law. 

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