Every outdoor space and sports facility, from the raised planters in the local park to your local team's sports ground, has been put there and is maintained by skilled workers with an understanding of plants and how we interact with them.

If you like the outdoors or would enjoy being part of the sporting world, then the parks, groundskeeping, landscaping and arboricultural sectors can offer a route towards high levels of job satisfaction and varied opportunities.

While pay can be low when starting out, the right training and experience can lead to management roles within your chosen sector achieving salaries upwards of £50,000 per year.

Career opportunities and training across all these sectors have been boosted with the increased focus on apprenticeship schemes. For most new entrants to the industry, these are among the best ways to kick start your career and provide an opportunity to gain National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) in your chosen field.

Horticulture is becoming more accessible as more colleges offer land-based subjects and tie in with apprenticeships. For example, Capel Manor College in Enfield, Middlesex, is creating a network of satellite colleges around London so that the students in the surrounding boroughs and counties don't have to travel far to study.

Many degree-level courses also cater for industry needs and will allow further opportunities to turn careers towards managerial and decision-making roles down the line. However, experience of day-to-day groundwork involved in maintaining horticultural facilities is key to moving forward in the sector.

Parks and grounds maintenance

The parks sector offers opportunities mainly with local authorities and the larger grounds maintenance contractors. Some councils will have their own parks team while others contract parks services to grounds maintenance firms.

Both offer similar opportunities because the work involved is essentially the same, with paths leading towards either hands-on maintenance duties or policy and planning.

Maintenance duties are based on an annual calendar of seasonal jobs, including weeding, mowing, planting, pruning, gritting paths, watering and litter picking. One highlight of parks maintenance is the mass planting of spring and summer bedding schemes.

Contractors and local authorities often seek seasonal workers to cope with peak season mowing and other operations. This can be a good introduction to the kind of work expected of you in the parks and grounds maintenance sectors.

Park policy and development officers have a varied workload in creating the plans and strategies to maintain and improve public open spaces in their area. This might include working with local communities to identify what the public needs from its parks, running events to promote parks to the public, and organising and developing the projects being carried out.

Horticultural qualifications are still of benefit for this kind of role, despite being less hands-on, so many people will have started out in maintenance areas.

Park managers supervise contractors or their own maintenance teams, and are expected to oversee management and development plans and manage budgets. Managers are employed directly by the council, many having been promoted from practical parks work, showing the progression that is possible within the sector.

Safety concerns within parks mean that a growing number of local authorities have developed park warden and ranger services to provide a uniformed presence around parks to discourage anti-social behaviour; this is another option for those with strong people skills.

Getting in

One of the best ways to get into working in a council parks department or a large grounds maintenance firm is via one of the growing number of apprenticeship schemes on offer. Most allow apprentices to train up to NVQ Level 3 in amenity horticulture, with opportunities to gain standard NPTC certificates in areas such as pesticide spraying and machinery operations.

Not everyone in the world of parks started there straight from school. Park departments and contractors are increasingly welcoming career changers whose skills and experiences are perhaps very different from those held by people already in the sector.

The credit crunch means that some departments may be hiring fewer staff in 2009, but with the recent boost in grants available for apprenticeship schemes, this is likely to remain an area where parks managers and contract managers are able to continue to build their workforce.

Turf for sport

Another area of outdoor management is the world of sports turf. Many people find that the combination of outdoor work, the involvement in sport and the challenge of maintaining high-quality surfaces in all weathers is a highly rewarding one.

All professional sports venues - football, cricket, golf, horse-racing, tennis, hockey, rugby or bowls - have their own grounds managers, advisers and assistants working to keep the turf in top condition. Local authorities and independent schools also need people to care for their outdoor sporting facilities.

Like players on the pitch, top sports-turf professionals often transfer around the globe. Paul Burgess, previously head groundsman at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium, for example, has recently moved to Real Madrid to look after the famous Bernabeu pitch.

In the past few years the Institute of Groundsmanship (IoG) has been developing a range of qualifications to make sense of the training opportunities out there. There is now an established route set out for employees in the sector and a range of opportunities to join the industry. Qualifications range from accredited short courses up to degree level and there are many non-accredited courses to back these up.

New entrants need to gain a good balance of vocational and theory-based training. Employers tend to prefer young starters to join as part of a mentoring process to get them involved in a successful team while learning their skills, this can be seen at many professional football clubs, golf clubs and other sporting institutes.

The IoG is looking to boost education facilities for groundskeeping with the development of the Specialist Sports College Network, seeking out more colleges to offer national certificates in sports-turf care.

The IoG is also involved in Train to Gain funding and modern apprenticeship schemes and can put interested parties in touch with sports clubs and grounds, where training will be relevant and supported by both the employer and a local college.

Landscaping

Working for a landscape contractor could mean you work on various projects from the transformation of a private domestic garden to the regeneration of public spaces in towns and cities. Such work allows you to hone skills in general plant care, design and hard landscaping techniques including bricklaying, paving and pond building.

For those with an interest in indoor plants and interior landscaping there are specialist firms dedicated to this area. Work in this area could see you brightening up offices with planting schemes or caring for the plants in shopping malls and other covered public spaces.

When you start work you will probably have to do laborious tasks such as site clearance and barrowing soil, but it gives you a good grounding in general site awareness, from health and safety aspects to the whole process of garden building. You might not be involved in the more technical work immediately but will get a good overall view of how landscaping contracts are carried out.

Patience is a virtue when looking to advance to the more skills-heavy work. Jason Locke, chairman of the Association of Professional Landscapers, says that to be a good landscaper you really need to understand the trade before you can go to the next step. "When I started in the industry I was meeting colleagues who still considered themselves as apprentices 10 years into their careers," he says.

His advice is not to try to run before you can walk. Landscaping can be a complex business, requiring an understanding of how the weather will affect the project, soil conditions, things to leave for a rainy day and things to make a priority.

More landscaping firms are offering modern apprenticeship schemes, and these prove a great way into the industry. As with other apprenticeship schemes, students train up to NVQ Level 3 and combine these formal qualifications with personal-skills training in teamwork, problem solving, communication and IT.

Students have the added benefit of being paid while training. Those looking to further their career development can go on to study university degrees in a range of specialist landscape areas.

Arboriculture

If you can't visit a park without feeling the urge to scramble up a tree, then arboriculture could be the horticultural career for you. At a hands-on level, arboriculturists will be maintaining trees. Depending on the job this can involve pruning, felling, stump grinding and removing the tree from site.

For most arboriculturists job satisfaction is a the main driver in choosing their career. It's a great alternative to being chained to a desk, giving the opportunity to work outside most of the time. Arboriculture allows you to stand back and see the results of your labour straight away.

At the technical level, staff can work as inspectors, ensuring that trees are safe, or as supervisors, sending out teams of workers and ensuring that the jobs are done properly. There are also jobs in management and consultancy.

As with most horticultural careers, arboriculture provides opportunities to start out at a basic practical level, learning operations on the ground. Training in machinery operations and climbing allow you to gain more responsibility.

Indeed to carry out most basic tree work, NPTC-accredited learning modules are advisable, and in many cases a legal requirement. Another way in to this industry is through college and university study, there are many types of qualifications available, from NVQs and National diplomas to foundation, honours and masters degrees.

Many general amenity horticulture courses include tree surgery as part of the syllabus allowing students to branch out into this field as their career progresses.

 

PAYSCALE - TYPICAL SALARIES FOR THE SECTOR

Groundsman, greenkeeper: £15-22,000 pa
Grounds maintenance supervisor: £15-25,000 pa
Park ranger: £18-23,000 pa
Tree surgeon: £20-29,000 pa
Head groundsman: £24-31,000 pa
Tree officer: £25-30,000 pa
Contracts manager: £25-35,000 pa
Arboriculture consultant: £25-35,000 pa
Head of parks: £30-50,000 pa