What does a Sustainable Finance Summer do?

Sustainable Finance Summer

A sustainable finance summer internship is a short placement (usually around eight to ten weeks over the summer, though length varies) inside a bank, asset manager, consultancy or corporate finance team, working on how environmental and social factors affect money decisions. In practice you support a team that advises on things like green bonds (debt raised to fund environmental projects), sustainability-linked loans, ESG ratings and reporting, or climate risk analysis. The work is done for the firm's clients - companies raising money, investors deciding where to put it, or internal teams that need to meet regulatory disclosure rules.

Starting salary: Varies, see below
Live graduate jobs: 1 open now
Main way in: Applying to a bank's or asset manager's structured summer…
They usually ask for: Usually you need to be in your penultimate year of an…

Approximate graduate salary

Summer internships at large UK financial employers are paid, often pro-rata against the graduate salary, which commonly works out to roughly £2,500–£5,000 for the placement at banks and asset managers, though this varies a great deal. Consultancies and specialist or not-for-profit employers typically pay less, sometimes at or near the National Living Wage. If you convert to a graduate role, starting salaries in this area are broadly around £30,000–£50,000 depending heavily on employer type and whether you are in London - these are approximations only.

What you'd actually do

Pulling ESG data (environmental, social and governance information on companies) from subscription databases and tidying it into spreadsheets so an analyst can compare companies on emissions, board structure or supply chain issues
Reading company sustainability reports and annual reports and summarising the useful bits into a short internal note or slide
Building or amending parts of an Excel model - for example adding a carbon price assumption, or working out what a sustainability-linked loan's interest step-up means if targets are missed
Producing slides for a client pitch or an internal committee: market overviews, league tables of recent green bond issuance, comparisons of what competitors have done

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Researching a regulation or framework and explaining it plainly to the team - CSRD, SFDR, the UK's Sustainability Disclosure Requirements, TCFD-style climate reporting, or the EU Taxonomy
Sitting in on client or internal calls, taking notes, and writing up follow-up actions
Working on a group project with the other interns, usually presented to senior staff at the end of the placement - this is common and often counts towards the graduate-offer decision

How graduates get in

Applying to a bank's or asset manager's structured summer internship programme in your penultimate year of an undergraduate degree - this is the most common route, and applications typically open in the early autumn a full year before the internship starts, with places filled on a rolling basis
Applying for a spring week or first-year insight programme the year before - these short schemes (a few days to a week) are often used by large financial employers as a feeder into summer internships, and doing one noticeably helps
Applying to the sustainability or climate practice of a consultancy, or to a Big Four-style firm's ESG advisory team, which often run their own summer schemes with slightly later deadlines
Direct applications to smaller, specialist outfits - ESG data providers, impact investors, boutique advisory firms, green finance NGOs and think tanks. These rarely have a formal scheme; you apply speculatively or to one-off adverts, and the deadlines are much later and less predictable

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Via a master's course in sustainable finance, climate change, environmental economics or similar, where summer placements are sometimes arranged through the department - less common than the mainstream internship route but a real path, especially for career changers
Some employers run a general finance internship and allocate you to a sustainable finance desk once you arrive, rather than recruiting specifically for it - so applying to the broader scheme is often the realistic way in

What employers ask for

Usually you need to be in your penultimate year of an undergraduate degree (or on a master's), because the internship is designed to convert into a graduate offer. A few employers accept final-years or recent graduates, but this is the exception
Degree subject matters less than people expect. Economics, finance, maths and engineering are common, but geography, environmental science, politics, law and natural sciences are all well represented in sustainable finance - the environmental knowledge is genuinely valued. Some quantitative roles (climate risk modelling, portfolio analytics) do effectively require a numerate degree
Most large employers ask for a 2:1 or expect you to be on track for one. A good number also screen on A-levels or UCAS points, though several have dropped this. Requirements genuinely vary - check each advert rather than assuming
No professional qualification is needed to get in. Some candidates have the CFA Certificate in ESG Investing, which is short and self-study; it is a nice-to-have that shows commitment, not a requirement, and nobody expects an intern to have it

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Demonstrable interest in the subject, evidenced concretely: a dissertation on climate policy, a university sustainable investment society, a relevant society committee role, a part-time role at a charity. Generic enthusiasm is not enough - interviewers probe
Right to work in the UK matters: some employers sponsor visas for interns and graduate roles, many do not. Check early, as this shapes which schemes are realistically open to you

Skills that matter

Excel to a solid working standard

Almost every task involves cleaning, cross-referencing or modelling data, and an intern who can use lookups and pivot tables without supervision is immediately more useful than one who cannot.

Reading dense documents fast and extracting what matters

Sustainability reports, bond frameworks and regulations are long and badly written, and a large part of the job is turning a hundred pages into five bullet points someone senior will actually read.

Understanding what a financial instrument actually is

The 'finance' half is not decorative - you need to grasp how a bond, a loan or a fund works before the 'green' label on it means anything to you.

Scepticism about data quality

ESG data is inconsistent, self-reported and full of gaps, so the valuable intern is the one who notices two sources disagree and flags it rather than pasting the number in.

Slide-building and writing for a busy reader

Most of what you produce goes into a client pitch or an internal memo, and clarity of layout and wording is judged as closely as the content.

Asking for context before starting a task

Interns who clarify what the output is for finish in two hours what otherwise takes two days in the wrong direction, and this is noticed when conversion decisions are made.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

The immediate goal is conversion: a return offer onto the firm's graduate programme, usually made in the weeks after the internship ends. Not everyone converts, and conversion rates differ enormously between employers and between years, so do not treat it as automatic.
Graduate analyst or associate in a sustainable finance, ESG research, or climate risk team - typically two to three years before the first promotion, though structured timelines are more common in banks than in consultancies or smaller firms.
Specialising: people tend to drift towards one of a few lanes - ESG investment research and stewardship on the asset management side, green bond and sustainability-linked debt origination on the banking side, climate risk and regulatory reporting, or sustainability consulting. The skills overlap but the day-to-day diverges quickly.
Mid-career, many move into corporate roles - in-house sustainability or sustainable finance teams at large companies - or into regulators, development finance institutions and NGOs. Movement in both directions is common and the field is young enough that non-linear paths are normal.
Some add the CFA, the CFA Certificate in ESG Investing, or an accountancy qualification depending on which lane they end up in. Timelines here vary widely and there is no single conventional route.

What people get wrong

“It is an environmental job that happens to be based in a bank, so your climate knowledge is the main thing being assessed.”

It is a finance job first. You will be assessed on numeracy, attention to detail and commercial awareness alongside your sustainability knowledge, and a lot of your time goes on standard finance intern work - models, slides, data.

“You will be helping decide which investments are ethical.”

Interns almost never make judgements. Most of the work is gathering, checking and presenting information so that someone far more senior can make a call, often within constraints set by regulation or a client's mandate.

“The sustainable finance route is less competitive than mainstream investment banking because it is newer.”

It attracts a very large and motivated applicant pool, and because the teams are usually small, the number of places is small too. It is not an easier side door.

“A summer internship is mainly a chance to learn and explore.”

At most large financial employers it functions as an extended interview for a graduate place, and behaviour, reliability and how you take feedback are being observed from the first week. This is less true at smaller firms and NGOs, where an internship may genuinely be just an internship with no graduate role attached.

Where this varies

The label covers quite different jobs. At an investment bank, a sustainable finance summer placement sits close to capital markets work and feels like a banking internship with a green overlay - long hours, pitch books, deadlines set by clients. At an asset manager it leans towards research, company engagement and stewardship (voting at shareholder meetings, pressing companies on their practices) and is calmer. At a consultancy or accountancy firm it is project-based advisory and reporting work, often helping clients comply with disclosure rules. At an ESG data provider or NGO it can be heavily analytical or heavily policy-focused. Location matters too: the bulk of these roles are in London, with Edinburgh significant for asset management and a smaller cluster in Manchester, Leeds and Bristol. Hours and formality differ sharply along the same lines - assume long days in banking, more conventional ones elsewhere, and check the specific advert rather than generalising from the sector.

See all 1 live Sustainable Finance Summer jobsFrom employers' own careers sites, updated daily Tailor your CV for this roleFree with an account, 3 a month

General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.