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Just starting your conservation tech career path? Our Early Career group is the best place to network, chat about your master's projects, and seek advice from your peers and those who have been down this path before! Join now to get to know community members and students from around the world!

discussion

How to kickstart a conservation tech career, when you lack a formal biology education?

Jacobo Domingo Gil

19 September 2023 2:26pm

Hello everyone!My name is Jacobo and I am Sustainable Tech Master's graduate, and a conservation tech enthusiast! I am currently in the lookout for an exciting opportunity to...

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Jacobo Domingo Gil

18 October 2023 12:54pm

Thanks for your reply! I am currently based in Spain but looking for opportunities at an international level. Primarily in a European context, but I am open to every option :) Any suggestion would be highly appreciated!

Brett Muir

22 October 2023 4:53pm

I unfortunately don't have many unique insights for Europe. I'm North America based.  We have companies out here like Aerium Analytics that seem like they'd fit your skill set. Perhaps there are some European equivalents. 

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discussion

Career Change Advice

Carly Sills

23 July 2023 3:27pm

Hi All,I’m seeking advice on a career change.  I am an early career software engineer currently working in medical device software test automation. I want to break into the...

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Eric Greenlee

31 July 2023 12:11am

Hi Carly!

It's exciting to hear that you're thinking about how to apply your skills to conservation! I made a career pivot last year from an electrical engineer at the department of defense to a PhD student designing community-driven environmental sensors and its been awesome! Definitely took some work to figure out what I wanted though.

Good places to start might be joining the AI for Conservation Slack group (it has a jobs page) and potentially the Work on Climate community. In my experience people in these communities are generally very happy to give advice to someone pivoting into the field. 

If you are considering the academic route, you should think about whether you want a Master's or PhD (or something else). It might be hard to find a Master's program specifically for software + animals, but some HCI programs might have tracks that allow you to work with animals, for example with Georgia Tech's Animal-Computer Interaction Lab. If you're open to a PhD, I would recommend exploring the existing academic literature for papers that seem interesting and then looking more into the authors.

I'd be happy to talk more if there's other advice I can provide. Good luck!

Carly Batist

2 August 2023 4:18am

Hi! Great to meet another Carly :) 

You might also want to look through the Conservation Tech Directory, which has lots of job boards & academic labs plus a huge number of organizations, companies, tools, etc. that you could peruse to help narrow down your search or strategize your career change.

Alexander Merdian-Tarko

27 September 2023 10:50am

Hi Carly,

I'm asking myself the same questions. I've recently contributed to MoveApps, which was a very nice entry point into conservation tech/movement ecology for me. Perhaps you find it interesting, too. There's a nice article on it here on WILDLABS. Let me know if you have any questions on this.

Cheers,

Alex

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Link

Digital Disruption for Conservation Toolkit

Gal Zanir

22 September 2023 12:18pm

Made available by the Digital Disruption and the Future of Conservation project team at Unearthodox, the toolkit provides conservation practitioners with a comprehensive introduction to Web 3.0 and AI concepts and their potential use for nature conservation.

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discussion

Where to start in ct ?

Lucas Harper

1 September 2023 2:50pm

Currently studying a 'diploma of conservation and ecosystem management' at TAFE NSW Australia and am enjoying it thoroughly. I love the prospect of working in the conservation...

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Akiba

2 September 2023 12:53am

Hi Lucas. 

I can understand that there are a lot of technologies being thrown around and it can be confusing about what is really needed. I recommend to first select an area of conservation you want to focus in, ie: ecological restoration, soil conservation, wildlife management, etc. Based on that decision, look at what technologies are available that can potential help in that field. We do a lot of work in ecological restoration and find that long term, longitudinal monitoring of conservation reserves are important. Because of that, we use a lot of datalogging and wireless communications to monitor remote locations. If you're interested in invasive species management, you might be drawn towards wildlife tracking (movement ecology), trap monitoring, drones, etc. 

The technology is a tool, and you should look at it like field gear. The gear will change depending on what you're setting out to do and the tool is supposed to make your life easier, not harder :)

Hope that helps.

Akiba

Lucas Harper

2 September 2023 6:14am

Very helpful, thank you. One more thing, are there any broad skills that apply to all areas of conservation tech that may be helpful to learn/improve, e.g data analysis?

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