Why an ESG and sustainability professional took an online financial management course
My undergraduate degree was in Political Science and Public Administration, not finance. But because the programme sat within a faculty of economics and administrative sciences, I had to take finance, accounting, and economics along the way. To my own surprise, I enjoyed them — and did well enough to come away with top marks in all three. At the time I filed it under "interesting, but not my path," and moved on.
Years later, working in sustainability and ESG, I kept noticing how often that early foundation quietly resurfaced. So I decided to revisit the subject — not through a degree, but by taking the Financial Management Specialization, an online course on Coursera. (Here's the certificate.) This time the concepts didn't just make sense — they connected to work I do every week.
What the specialisation covered
It was made up of seven shorter courses, each a different angle on how a business actually creates and measures value:
- Business Value Creation
- Cash Flow Management
- Balance Sheet and Business Cases
- Risk Management and Financial Theory
- Investment Evaluation
- Financial Statements
- Business Impact
Will this make me a finance expert? No — and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But revisiting these ideas with a decade of working context behind me was a genuinely different experience. The second time around, they clicked.
Why it matters for ESG
ESG and finance used to live in separate buildings. That era is closing fast. Frameworks like the CSRD tie sustainability disclosure to financial reporting — same audit rigour, often the same annual report. Double materiality asks not only how an organisation affects the world, but how sustainability issues affect its financials. You can't answer the second half of that question without being comfortable reading financial statements.
When you work in sustainability day to day, the numbers stop being abstract — they finally have context.
The specialisation sharpened exactly the things I touch in ESG controlling:
- Reading the statements together. Seeing how the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow connect is what lets me trace a sustainability cost or investment to where it actually lands.
- Valuing decisions over time. Decarbonisation projects and transition plans are capital decisions; investment evaluation is how those get made and defended.
- Risk in financial terms. Investors and lenders read ESG through risk and cost of capital. Knowing that vocabulary turns "this is the right thing to do" into "this protects and creates value."
The point
I didn't take the course to leave sustainability behind. I did it to do the work better — to make ESG arguments that hold up where the real decisions are made. Impact that can't be funded stays a slideshow. More often than not, the skill that turns a good intention into an approved plan is financial literacy. For anyone serious about sustainability, learning the money isn't a detour from the mission. It's how the mission gets paid for.
Working on something in this space? I'd be glad to compare notes. Get in touch.