JONATHAN HORSLEY has embarked on a radical career change. The 46-year-old engineer has left his post as director of a division of Zytek, the electric and hybrid vehicle specialist, to take a course that he expects will pitch him into the battle against climate change.

Horsley is among the first 12 students to sign up this month for the MBA in strategic carbon management at the University of East Anglia.

Along with learning the basics of business administration, from leadership to financial management, he will gain an understanding of carbon-related matters such as environmental economics and the impact of climate change on business strategy.

This will, Horsley hopes, give him the skills needed to work in the commercial world reducing carbon emissions and mitigating the impact of climate change.

He is confident that there will be plenty of job opportunities when he graduates in a year’s time and expects to be earning at least as much as he was at Zytek. At the higher end of the scale, managing directors and sales directors of low-carbon enterprises can earn a starting salary of up to £100,000.

“But money isn’t my motiva-tion,” said Horsley. “I want to do something positive in business. Climate protection is at an embryonic stage and I am keen to get in at the ground level.”

The University of East Anglia’s 12-month MBA is the first of its kind and costs students £13,500. It will soon be joined by another pioneering master’s course, a 12-month MSc in carbon management to be launched at Edinburgh University in September. This will cost £7,500.

The MSc will have a more technical, less business-orientated emphasis than the MBA but will still look at the implications of climate change for business strategy as well as its impact on government policy and national economies. It will also look at the science and the various approaches to dealing with the problem. Both qualifications are intended to set their graduates on new career paths in which they will guide businesses and public-sector organisations through carbon management, climate-change regulations and even the nascent carbon-trading markets. Other universities are expected to follow.

The business community is already beginning to find climate change an increasingly pervasive issue. Last month, the government started to factor notional carbon-damage costs into its policy and investment decisions, while European ministers announced that the aviation industry would be subject to a carbon-pollution cap by 2012.

Rory Sullivan, head of investor responsibility at Insight Investment, the asset-management arm of the Halifax and Bank of Scotland group, said: “For most companies, it will certainly become a priority issue over the next 10 years.”

He predicted that a combination of new regulations and public interest would sustain growth in carbon-related jobs and that there would be a demand for people who had the right skills.

The need for skilled people to manage carbon would create a new class of professional manager, according to Kevan Williams, programme director of the University of East Anglia’s MBA course and director of the Nor-wich Management Development Centre.

“Climate change is a big opportunity because as people become more convinced to change their own impact, they will look for new services and products to allow them to do so,” he said.

Williams predicted that their extra know-how would enable the MBA graduates to go into senior management, some as directors of corporate social responsibility, others in more mainstream roles where their expertise could give their employer a competitive edge, not least in securing public-sector contracts that increasingly demand carbon-performance information as part of the tendering process.

Craig Mackenzie, a senior lecturer in sustainable enterprise at the Edinburgh Business School and one of the principal teachers on its MSc course, said the course’s graduates would be in demand. “If you are about to embark on a career in business or in the public sector, it is almost certain that over the next 10 to 20 years, your decision-making as a business leader or policymaker will be affected by the need to mitigate climate change,” he said.

David Reay, the programme director, said: “Our graduates will be able to tell companies how to get ready for climate change and prepare themselves for future legislation.”

It was difficult to recruit such people at present, said Richard Tipper, technical director of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management, which does research and consultancy work on climate-change mitigation. “There is a skills shortage,” he said.

Tipper has a PhD in agricultural sciences from Stirling University, while many of the firm’s analysts have come from environmental and business backgrounds. He said that people with specialist carbon qualifications would interest Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management, but only if they possessed other skills as well. “I wouldn’t say it is essential to have one of these degrees to get into the field but it may help,” he said.

Sullivan agreed that the new qualifications would enhance the employability of an individual who already possessed a qualification in, say, engineering or economics. “There will be a market for graduates who understand carbon management but they will also need to have specific skills that can be applied in business,” he said.

Studying for a specialist MBA was not always a sensible option, according to Steven Currall, professor of management science and innovation at University College London. He said that while there was a demand for expertise in climate change, this was not guaranteed to grow in the future. “There is a risk associated with changing trends in technology and industry that more flexible, less specialist degrees can respond to,” he said.

Williams said the importance of climate change would not decline and that, with growing numbers of people with standard MBAs, having extra knowledge of carbon management would give someone an edge in a rapidly growing field.

The Marks & Spencer high-street chain recently appointed its first climate-change officer as part of a £200m ecological initiative that chief executive Sir Stuart Rose pledged would aim to make the company carbon neutral by 2012.

Finding an individual suitably qualified to take on wide-rang-ing, root-and-branch work had been a challenge, according to Mike Barry, Marks & Spencer’s head of corporate social responsibility. “The whole area of carbon management, from measuring your own carbon footprint to developing practical ways to reduce it, requires a new set of business skills,” he said.

Graduates with appropriate skills were needed. “Both [the MBA and MSc] courses are necessary when you look at what business will have to do in the next 10 years,” said Barry.