Amber Mose Builds Sustainable Supply Chain Framework for Arconic Aluminum During Fellowship
Amber Mose, a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin Master of Science in Sustainable Management, built a framework for sustainable supply chain activities at Arconic Aluminum during her whirlwind 10-week Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Climate Corps fellowship this past summer, an experience she’s already applying to her current role as a sustainability specialist at Enerpac. Amber is the first graduate from Wisconsin to be selected for this opportunity.
The highly coveted EDF fellowship gives participants a chance to tackle climate change at every level. EDF provides training and matches graduate students with host companies that seek to advance their environmental and sustainability goals. Amber began her fellowship with a week of intense training on environmental justice, sustainability and supply chains, how to mitigate greenhouse gas, and accounting basics. Her experience was remote, except for two days she spent in Pittsburgh at Arconic’s headquarters to meet the team.
“I was pulling information from industry journals and peer-reviewed papers about different topics to do with the whole project. It had to do with supply chain sustainability, engaging suppliers, engaging with beyond tier one suppliers–so like your supplier suppliers, and then third order up the chain,” she says.
Amber worked directly under the Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) director and procurement team. While the ESG director was technically her supervisor, she also had an engagement manager at EDF to support her. While at Arconic, she worked with legal, enterprise risk, and procurement teams, including metals and indirect procurement.
“I was asking questions about, how do you measure your team’s success? And what does the procurement process look like? What is the current state of supplier relationship management?”
In the second half of the 10-week program, she created an explainer document of what she had found, her recommendations, and a final PowerPoint presentation. She sat down with her supervisor, who encouraged her to build a framework based on her recommendations, which meant a shift in project scope.
“I had to do a lot of reworking of the recommendations I had to make so that they interlocked. And then the second part of building the framework was, all right, well what happens next? What order do they implement these recommendations in? Building out almost a project plan for them to take once I left.”
“It was a lot in just 10 weeks. They warned us ahead of time that it would be. Otherwise, EDF is really good and really clear about what happens. There was a very defined process. We followed it to the letter,” Amber says.
Amber is the first EDF fellow from the Universities of Wisconsin, and the first in the state. She noted that most of the program’s participants come from the coasts.
“The Midwest almost gets a little bit left behind. One of the things that I’ve given to EDF as feedback is that you guys need to look at the interior of the country a lot. There’s a ton of opportunity there. And I think that something like this, where somebody can go and get big experience at a company that maybe is looking into this stuff already and then take it home, I think that’s really powerful.”
Other fellows in her cohort were from schools like Columbia University, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Colorado-Boulder. Nonetheless, she felt her experience in the UW Sustainable Management program prepared her well for the experience.
“It’s very intimidating. But I think that the program here has something special to offer, particularly for people who are starting a program from scratch because it certainly seems to be geared toward them.”
Amber had actually applied to the fellowship program the year before and was not accepted. She attributes this to a lack of clear vision regarding the things she wanted to study. In her initial proposal, she had written she was open to doing anything related to sustainability. However, while in the Sustainable Management program, she was able to use material from her coursework to narrow her focus.
“In the cover letter that I submitted, I was able to talk about a project, my term project for that class, about engaging your suppliers better as a step to take before you even tackle supply chain sustainability and scope three emissions. And being able to talk about that project and talk about supplier engagement, I think is part of why I got into the program in the first place. And it’s also why I was able to be paired into the project that I did end up doing because supplier engagement factored so heavily into it.”
Her advice to fellowship applicants: Pick no more than two topic areas of interest.
“That’s going to make it easier for you to write your application materials. And it’s also going to make it much clearer for the people who are looking at the application. I think that’s one of the main things that helped me get into the program that I did this summer. If you can pick one or two things and if you can speak to that and write about it, apply to it.”
To be successful in a fellowship program, Amber recommends knowing how to take disorganized information and pull out a common thread.
“I had a defined project plan, for example. But there was a little bit of scope creep and there was some adding on. Being able to go to my supervisor and saying, “I know you wanted this, but you’re also asking these questions. Which one of these takes precedence? Which one needs to be in the final deliverable? I can do all this stuff, but if I do more, it’s going to have less depth.”
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Time management is also important. Amber was fully remote during her fellowship and had to manage up and schedule meetings to get the information she needed. Motivating herself to get things done was a skill she learned in the Sustainable Management program, and it’s applicable in any job. “It’s knowing how to operate within an organization and learning how to adjust to it really quickly,” she says.
After completing her fellowship Amber returned to her full-time position at Enerpac. She’d kept in touch with her coworkers over the summer, but found that being gone for 10 weeks is a challenge. However, she’s already applying the experience she got at the fellowship to her job, the goal of which is to create a sustainability program from scratch.
“Getting this kind of experience at a different organization that was just at a different stage of the journey, and specifically, if you’re doing it in sustainability and you’re doing it at a company that has a sustainability project for you, you’ve already got that buy-in. You don’t have to convince somebody that this project needs to be done,” she says. “So I think being able to get that experience, but also being a little bit of the expert in the room on the subject of your project is also a really good thing.”
Amber also learned about staff layoffs that affected her team at Arconic after she left. “They were doing some reorganization,” she says. “And they had some overlap with what other people were doing.”
Knowing that layoffs can happen at any time in any department, it’s important to make yourself more marketable through extra training, according to Amber. “That’s something I’m planning to pursue to just kind of hedge against that.”
Sustainability specialists, who work in a business capacity, are number two on a list of this year’s fastest growing jobs from World Economic Forum (WEF), and three sustainability-related roles (sustainability analyst, sustainability specialist, and sustainability manager) were on the top 10 list of the fastest growing job postings on LinkedIn from WEF 2018-2022.
Note: This is a companion piece to an earlier profile on Amber’s experience in the UW Sustainable Management program.
Interested in learning more about the 100 percent online UW Sustainable Management master’s program? Take a look at the curriculum page or reach out to an enrollment adviser with any questions about the program. For more information, call 608-800-6762 or email learn@uwex.wisconsin.edu.