So here's the deal. I tell you something strange about Bangladesh and in return you can help me make a well informed decision about my next career move. Good, we're agreed then.

I'll start with the strange thing. Sunday afternoon I was called downstairs with all the other VSO staff to wish our admin manager a happy 60th birthday. Nothing funny there - there was a big cake, some soft drinks and we sang happy birthday and everything. It was even only fitting that we do all this for him as he has spent the last 20 years working for the organisation. The strange thing is that he doesn't usually celebrate this birthday. No, I don't mean HIS birthday but THIS birthday as most Bangladeshis have 2. This of course would be perfectly normal if they were the Queen but seeing as they clearly are not I had to find out what he was talking about.

It turns out that most Bangladeshis also have an academic birthday, which is the birthday given to them for school. Why a different day? Well, it's not just a different day but a different year and therein lies the point. You see, to get into a government job you need to pass your exams before you turn 25, so a lot of parents change the year of birth of their children to give them some extra time to get in. According to Ranju this can be 2, 3 even 4 years! Surely though it would only take a quick glance at the person's birth certificate to uncover this falsification? Ah but there my friend you're assuming that most people have birth certificates, and they don't. Birth registration is very poor here but is being promoted and developed by many NGO's as it's also a way of combating under age marriages. How so? Usually when some one objected to a marriage on the grounds that the girl was too young all you had to do was slip a few taka to the right local government official and as if by magic he'd produce a certificate with the right date on to make the poor lass 18 years old. If you have a properly registered birth you can prove the girl isn't 18 and that stops the marriage. Simple. And if that all wasn't strange enough for you then as I was walking home after the birthday I passed a dwarf walking a monkey on a lead. That's right - a dwarf with a monkey, and not a circus to be seen anywhere.

I've kept my side of the bargain so now over to yours. Basically I think I know where I want to go next professionally but I'm not sure of the best way to get there. In a nutshell I've been looking for something that combines the best parts of working in business with having a socially positive impact and I've come up with corporate social responsibility. If you're sitting there thinking "what's this new management buzzword really mean?" then all it really is a company taking responsibility for all the different ways it affects its environment and its stakeholders and trying to make its impact as positive as possible. Stakeholders? This basically means anyone affected by the company and its operations i.e. customers, suppliers, employees, people living near the company's factories and shops, local and national government as well as NGOs and community groups.

Traditionally this sort of thing has mostly been about environmental issues and regulatory compliance, but over the last 5-10 years there's been a change in public opinion towards big business and its apparent disregard for anything apart from money. Not sure what I mean? Well, how about Nike and its sweatshops in Asia? Or oil companies and their reluctance to clean up their oil spills? Or McDonalds and obesity? Or mobile phone companies and transmitter masts and radiation? There seems to have been a coming together of greater information available from the media and the Internet with a growing perception that big business cared more about money than people, and the people didn't like that. The people who rioted in Seattle and Genoa were arguably the extreme tip of a much larger and well supported iceberg. Anyway, I digress.

So basically I think I'd quite like to work in this sort of area, helping big companies be more responsible corporate citizens as the saying goes. The problem of course is that I don't really have much on my CV in the way of direct experience or qualifications, or do I? You see, when I look at the biographies of the leading consultants in this field they've all been doing it for years and have the sort of references that would make me as a potential client feel very impressed and reassured. On the other hand, there are also a whole bunch of companies who are just starting out down this road with no real experience, and especially in the UK as there is now a new law that was passed last year which obliges publicly quoted UK companies to include an assessment of anything issues that could affect current or future performance in their annual reports. This could mean anything from market trends to a new corporate mission, but could also include social and environmental factors too. Sooo, my view is that there should be more jobs going in the not too distant future if they're not already going now.

My problem is that I don't really know where these jobs are, what they are, and what sort of person is likely to be recruited for them. Should I aim for in-house departments or a consultancy firm? Do I need some postgraduate qualification, and if so which one and from where?! You see, there really is quite a lot to this question but this is where you my faithful supporters and friends come in. You see, with all your personal and professional contacts you must be able to find at least one person who is or knows someone working in something related to corporate social responsibility. They might call it something different, like sustainable development, or only really see it as an environmental or health and safety concern, but if the company's of a certain size they'll be doing something. If it's a multinational or quoted on the stock market then there's definitely something going on in a department somewhere, if you can find out which one. If you're working in finance or banking you've probably got some socially responsible investing going on, or maybe in your company they talk more about risk management. It may not even be in a company but an academic in a university or a freelance consultant, but chances are you know someone who could tell you more, OR would be prepared to tell me more if I asked them nicely over a coffee.

Go on, help a poor volunteer get back to having a normal life and do good things at the same time. Otherwise my easiest career move is staying I Bangladesh doing organisational capacity building and neither of us wants that now do we? Let me put it this way; when I passed that dwarf with the monkey walking down the street I had to stare, but everyone else was staring at me. I'm apparently far freakier to them here than anything else going by, and there's only so much of that a man can take!