The American workforce is aging fast. By 2030, nearly 1 in 5 workers will be over the age of 65. This shift is especially disruptive in knowledge-driven sectors like environmental consulting industry, risk management, and commercial real estate. As seasoned environmental consultants retire, firms are under pressure to address succession planning and knowledge transfer before critical expertise walks out the door.
Mentorship is a powerful strategy to address challenges associated with an aging U.S. workforce, particularly among professionals, by facilitating knowledge transfer, enhancing workforce adaptability, and mitigating labor shortages.
Mentorship: A Hidden Key to Future-Proofing Your Firm
Effective mentoring programs are associated with increased employee retention, higher productivity, and stronger leadership pipelines. In environmental consulting, where complex regulations and long sales cycles are the norm, the ability to grow talent from within is a critical competitive advantage. Leading consulting firms view mentorship as a valuable tool for fostering leadership and elevating different voices across the company. Studies show mentoring programs increase employee retention by 20–30% and improve productivity by fostering skill-sharing.
Beth Sexton, Senior Consultant at SME, shared her perspective: “I have had the benefit of having wonderful mentors in my career, and enjoy paying it forward with the next round of young leaders in our industry. We work in complex and fast-paced spaces but having the time and space to provide meaningful discussions and experiences to young professionals helps to set them up for success in the future.”
Passing the Torch: Mentorship for a Changing Workforce
For managers, actively mentoring younger professionals is critical for passing along not just technical knowledge, but valuable communication, leadership, and client management skills. And mentorship goes far beyond training. It offers young consultants personal guidance, fosters confidence, and helps them navigate the unspoken dynamics of professional environments. What’s more, it also provides retiring professionals a sense of legacy, as their wisdom continues to shape future industry leaders.
“Mentorship is a continuous cycle (call it the circle of professional life): We learn from those who advise us at the beginning of our career. Later, we pay it forward by mentoring others. It is how professional growth, leadership, and mutual respect are nurtured,” noted Andrew Bailey, REM, CSRP and President of ECA Risk Management.
At LightBox, we’ve seen this firsthand. Our Developing Leaders mentorship program just wrapped its sixth year, connecting emerging professionals with experienced mentors across the environmental due diligence and risk management industries. The result? More confident environmental professionals with deeper technical expertise, stronger business development and network skills, and a new generation better prepared to lead.
Creating a Mentorship Ecosystem Across Environmental Consulting Firms
Effective mentorship should not be confined to silos. The most successful programs often encourage cross-functional and even cross-organizational collaboration. In large firms, getting mentees involved in a mentorship program across multiple service lines that may be slightly outside of their comfort zone is a way to create new perspectives, broaden their area of expertise, make new connections in other departments, and possibly lead to new opportunities.
Connecting mentees with a diverse range of mentors helps them gain a more well-rounded and comprehensive view of the industry while creating networking opportunities that fuel business development and innovation. It’s also a subtle, yet powerful way to democratize knowledge and break down the barriers that often exist between departments or specialties.
Building from the Ground Up
Mentorship is much more than a luxury. It is a necessity for any firm committed to long-term success in the environmental consulting sector. It’s how environmental professionals ensure that the hard-earned wisdom of today’s leaders becomes the foundation for tomorrow’s innovation—and how firms stay competitive in a rapidly shifting talent landscape.
NOTE TO READERS
This blog is an excerpt from the Inside the Industry column authored by Dianne Crocker, LightBox’s research director, and Alan Agadoni, senior VP, LightBox EDR published monthly by the Air & Waste Management Association in its EM magazine. The column covers a mix of timely business, strategic, and technical topics impacting the world of environmental management.
The full article appears in the July 2025 issue of EM Magazine, a copyrighted publication of the Air & Waste Management Association (www.awma.org), and is accessible in its entirety here in the full-issue PDF that can be downloaded and printed, or via AWMA’s online, interactive EM flipbook.
