It’s no secret there’s a labor shortage in the landscape industry. In response, the National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP) debuted a new website it says will help draw new people into the industry.
LandscapeIndustryCareers.org highlights career paths, industry details, education opportunities, a job board and information for parents and advisers of students interested in landscaping. Content includes articles, statistics and more than a dozen video profiles of professionals, such as arborists, landscape designers, account managers, lawn care technicians and others, who explain what their jobs entail and why they are passionate about their careers.
The job board is free for industry members through the end of the year. Starting in 2018, there will be fees to post jobs; those rates haven’t been determined yet. Following an early March soft launch, employers added more than 250 postings to the job board.
LandscapeIndustryCareers.org is one facet of the Industry Growth Initiative (IGI), which NALP introduced in late 2015 with two goals: grow the industry and grow the workforce.
“It really is all about how people perceive us and how we brand ourselves as an industry,” said Missy Henriksen, NALP’s vice president of public affairs.
IGI, which was originally a standalone NALP consumer awareness campaign, is now part of the NALP Foundation. This move happened over the past several months, Henriksen said.
The $4.1 million foundation, which is “dedicated to advancing professional careers in the landscape industry,” seeks to raise $500,000 a year for the IGI, according to the NALP website.
Once the IGI’s framework for growing the industry was in place—with a consumer-facing website called LoveYourLandscape.org—it was time to move on to the workforce component, Henriksen said. The first step is the careers website.
The foundation board, the public affairs advisory committee and industry academics—including those on the board, instructors who are part of the Faculty Forum and other academic members of the association—provided input to develop the site. For inspiration, the planning team looked at other trade associations’ workforce sites and some corporation’s career sites, such as Chipotle’s.
NALP also partnered with PR firm Vault Communications and digital marketing agency Arc Intermedia to launch the site, which has been in development for about nine months. Next, a national public relations and marketing campaign will support the launch, along with online advertising and social media promotions.
All of these efforts are funded by voluntary donations to the IGI, Henriksen said.
“The more people that invest in the Industry Growth Initiative, the more we will be able to do,” she added. “We don’t want people to think we’ve built a website and our work is done. The website is really the beginning of our work to promote the industry.”
Henriksen estimates the association invested at least $175,000 into the website’s development.
“It’s been a long time coming,” she said. “It’s important we invest because we’re vying for the same people a lot of industries are. It’s not something we want to do halfheartedly. The stakes are too high.”
