Anyone can put “passionate about sustainability” on a CV. Plenty do. The question an employer quietly asks is a harder one: can this person actually do the work — lead it, plan it, buy for it, see it through? Passion is easy to claim and hard to check.
This is the checklist the checkers use. The GPM® Sustainability Competence Standard — version 2.1 (2025), from GPM with PMI — is the companion to the P5™ Standard: where P5 measures a project, this one measures a person. It costs nothing to read, and you can read it here.
Read the standard
The reader above holds the complete standard — turn the pages, or go fullscreen for a proper read.
What’s inside, in plain terms
Ten working skills, described the way work actually happens. Some you might expect — leading honestly, buying responsibly, helping people through change. Others go further: looking after the living systems a project touches, weighing its real impacts, keeping the right people and treating them well. Two extra skills apply to those who run projects: designing them and keeping watch over them.
What makes it different is the evidence. For each skill the standard names what you should be able to show — real activities, real knowledge, real results — rather than what you rate yourself on a form. It is the difference between “I’m good with people” and a referee who saw you do it.
Why it matters for you
This standard is the syllabus behind the CSPP™ credential — the skills our courses teach and the exam tests. So if you read it and think “I do half of this already, with nothing to show for it”, that is exactly the gap our courses close. And if you want the project-side measuring stick too, the P5™ Standard is on the blog as well.
