Careers News

Careers in Landscaping

Are you interested in the environment around us? There are plenty of career paths that cater to people who would like to work physically, creatively, scientifically, as well as in business and administrative roles. This week we are looking at Landscaping!

A landscaper’s role is to create and maintain outdoor areas, such as gardens, parks, playgrounds, recreational spaces and even commercial courtyards. Tasks that a landscaper may perform are groundskeeping, building maintenance, lawn mowing either by hand or ride on, maintaining and planting flower beds, applying fertilizer and pesticides, cutting tree limbs, trimming shrubs, pulling weeds and even maintaining water features and plastering garden walls.  Landscapers can be employed by local councils, private companies or have their own landscaping company and work for themselves.

Other related fields to landscaping include: 

• Agronomists - people who work with the soil underneath the ground often working with farmers looking after the wellbeing of crops and food production, 
• Arborists, whose main role is to look after the wellbeing of trees, 
• Horticulturalists, who also take care of plants and gardens, as well as identifying plant and soil diseases. 

Working alongside landscapers are:

• Architects - making sure that the buildings they design are not only aesthetically pleasing and functional but energy-efficient, environmentally friendly and safe. 
• Urban Designers identify community needs present and future. They create plans to meet those needs, whether it be schools, parks and other recreational spaces shopping centres, car parking, hospitals and churches, anywhere and anything a community requires. 
• Surveyors establish official land, airspace and water boundaries. They work with civil engineers, architects and urban designers, builders, councils and landscapers who will bring all the plans to fruition.

To run a business, whether it is with local councils, large scale private enterprise or small owner-operators running a landscaping business, there is a large contingent of peripheral businesses that are required to support landscapers, from Account managers to keep clients coming back to your landscaping services, administrators and accountants, who keep the business running, business developers who discover new clients and their individual needs, project managers, who see the project from beginning to end, and suppliers. So, there are many avenues requiring different skills and interests that go hand in hand with landscaping.

If you are interested and have a passion to work outdoors you can begin a Landscaping or Horticulture Apprenticeship either as an SBAT whilst studying VCAL or full time after Year 12.  To learn more come and speak with Mrs Ramsay the Careers Coordinator in the Senior Centre. 

Areas like Urban Design can be studied at TAFE and university. Architecture is a degree course but pathways through TAFE can help to provide entry.

• What do landscape professionals do?
• Career HQ Landscaper
• Landscaper Job Description
• Career Explorer Surveyor

For a comprehensive list of courses (including the many double-degree options) on offer at Victorian universities, TAFEs, and Private Providers, visit VTAC at https://www.vtac.edu.au/.

You can also explore further using the Career Targets on the Doncaster Careers website.

Donna McKinlay

Careers Support

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