Principal Consultant Life Cycle Assessment

Overview

Role: Principal Consultant - Life Cycle Assessment

Location: UK Flexible

Role ID: 2023-1718

Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world

Ricardo plc is a global strategic, environmental, and engineering consulting company, listed on the London Stock Exchange. With over 100 years of engineering excellence and employing close to 3,000 employees in more than 20 countries, we provide exceptional levels of expertise in delivering leading-edge and innovative cross-sector sustainable products and solutions. Every day, we enable our customers to solve the most complex and dynamic challenges to help achieve a safe and sustainable world.

Energy & Environment, one of Ricardo plc’s five operating business units, is a leader in sustainability consultancy, solving complex environmental challenges through industry-leading analysis, advice and data. With more than 40 years of heritage in addressing air quality, environmental and sustainability issues, our customers value us for our deep understanding and breadth of services covering the entire value chain from evidence, policy & strategy to implementation.

The sustainability team at Ricardo Energy & Environment helps clients to understand and then reduce their environmental and social impacts. A key tool in this process is life cycle assessment (LCA), which examines such impacts across the full life cycle of a product or service.  We have delivered a significant number of LCA projects over the last five years across a broad range of products and sectors from automotive to building materials to specific low carbon technologies.

LCA is a key growth area for the business, and we are currently looking for an experienced Principal Consultant to join our rapidly growing LCA team.

Key Responsibilities

The successful candidate must have a strong track record of winning and delivering work related to LCA. Your ability to identify and develop new opportunities is important, as is the ability to hold strategic conversations at a senior level including assessing needs, developing technical propositions and taking clients on their sustainability journey along with the following:

• Lead the delivery of complex LCA projects or tasks within such projects, including responsibility  for client satisfaction, timely delivery, project financial management and ensuring high-quality outputs.
• Lead, manage and contribute to the development of proposals for new work.
• Be experienced in building LCA models, including Microsoft Excel and software packages such as SimaPro or GaBi, and be able to support and train more junior colleagues in developing LCA models using these platforms.
• Have a detailed understanding of the relevant ISO standards, as well as other methodologies relating to LCA, such as carbon footprinting, EPDs, PCRs and PEF.
• Provide senior-level expert quality assurance and technical review of project deliverables, including ensuring models outputs are valid and checking reports conformity to standards such as ISO 140444.
• Develop and maintain close client and partner relationships to support the winning of new business.
• Ensure appropriate profile raising and marketing of Ricardo’s services and capabilities.

Ricardo operates a parallel ‘team leader’ system for pastoral staff management, meaning that you will not initially have any direct line management responsibilities. However, if such line management is of interest to you, we can help you to demonstrate and develop that capability.

Key competencies and experience

• Significant experience of managing and delivering LCA projects in accordance with international standards.

• Significant practical career experience and be able to demonstrate relevant technical capability, effective project management and excellent communication skills.

• Higher education qualification (Bachelor’s Degree) in an environmental discipline, or otherwise to have a good track record working in an environmental role, so that you can demonstrate your knowledge.

• Experience of working in the consultancy sector, or organisational responsibility for the outputs from contracted consultants, to demonstrate that you have the necessary commercial awareness. We would also be interested to talk to candidates currently performing roles directly within industry especially where they have a strong commercial awareness.

• Experience of identifying and developing business opportunities.

Skills and behaviours

• Excellent analytical skills with ability to identify, develop and implement solutions.
• Excellent writing skills to communicate clearly and without errors – accuracy and attention to detail are vital.
• Strong client and stakeholder communication skills (e.g. influencing, negotiation, presentation, relationship management).
• Ability to develop client propositions (e.g. understanding of client challenges and develop and propose suitable solutions).
• Ability to build and lead teams, and to coordinate and prioritise activities to ensure delivery of work on time and to budget.
• Ability to work autonomously and pro-actively.
• High level of computer literacy, including familiarity with the full Microsoft Office software suite.
• A flexible approach – able to see where help is needed and support colleagues as necessary.
• Be comfortable juggling a variety of tasks in a sometimes fast-paced operational environment.

Working here

You will be warmly welcomed into our workplace where every voice matters. We are diverse thinkers and doers, coming together to create a culture of inclusion. We will support you to find your place.

We will encourage you to use your passion and expertise to make a positive impact through the projects you work on.  Your knowledge and desire to bring about change will be invaluable in helping deliver innovative solutions that support communities across the globe in becoming safer and more sustainable.

Work life balance

We offer flexible approaches to work, whether that is working from home, being in the office, or as a hybrid worker. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. Wellbeing is at the core to our culture, allowing employees to flourish and to achieve their full potential.

Benefits

We want you to know how much you are valued. Your remuneration and benefits package will reflect that. You will receive a range of benefits which include support for your physical and mental health.

Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date.

Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date.