Sustainability Strategy

What do you do and how is it contributing to tackling climate change and achieving Net Zero?

Hi, my name is Steph and I work for Pfizer. I work as an omni channel manager here at Pfizer, in the vaccines team specifically focused on the UK. On the side of that, I also have a role in our sustainability steering group. That group is aiming to build our UK sustainability strategy, focusing on decarbonisation, and also on engaging our colleagues in how we can build a more sustainable business.

What does you typical day involve?

So, some of the work I've been working on has been integrating and introducing some workshops to engage our colleagues on sustainability. We've used a partner called 'Today do this', which are action-based workshops and we've had lots of success with engaging colleagues in building a more sustainable mindset through this initiative.

So, my day is different every day. But I'd say like per week, as part of my sustainability role, at least, we have at least a couple of meetings a week to decide with different people from our environment, health and safety function, some from our commercial function, some from our training function, and also meetings with our country President to talk about this topic because it's extremely important to the business. And when we have these discussions about different things that are happening, the external environment what's going on with the NHS, what's going on in Pfizer Global with the best at strategy as well, and then we basically decide on actions and those meetings to take.

Some of these actions might be involving external partners. So, then I'll reach out to external partners and start projects with them. For example, our 'Today do this' partnership. We also have partnerships with One Young World and we'll be starting a new set of workshops as well with another partner called Forum for the future.

So, we're working with lots of different really cool people who are all helping us to shape our sustainability strategy and also get colleagues involved empower them to make change in the organisation to build a sustainable mindset.

What one piece of advice would you give to someone seeking a career in the pharmaceutical industry?

There are so many different roles out there and the pharma industry has so many different options that once you start to understand some of the industry and you can see some of those options that are available to you.

You could actually go out and pursue them and you can kind of build your own career. It's a bit like building Lego bricks, you can just add different bits on and you can jump somewhere else get some different experience. You can get involved in a lot of projects get involved with something completely different to what your background might be. My background is in biomedical sciences, and I'm now moving into more sustainable development and international global health initiatives. So, there's so much exposure and interesting things to discover in the pharma industry.