Explore Your Options for Growing a Career in the Landscape Industry

The landscape industry offers fulfilling, diverse, and promising career paths for anyone who loves the outdoors and design. Many different skills, interests, and experience levels are available to those who want to spend their time making a visible impact on the environment. Read on to learn more about the industry, resources to uncover different types of careers, and understand the current environment for hiring.

According to the National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP), people often seek employment within the industry but don’t know specifically what they want to do or how to get started. Within the United States, despite the diverse and interesting opportunities, the landscape industry has seen slower growth in the last twenty years, most notably since the 2008 recession.

That means landscaping companies can struggle to find enough staff to compete in the often high-demand landscape work market and are even forced to turn down projects due to limited bandwidth. A key challenge is that perceptions of the landscape industry are, at times, shallow, without realizing all the types of work beyond traditional landscape design and maintenance.

This showcases an opportunity for job seekers to build their skills and explore landscape-related career paths, whether they are newly entering the workforce or seasoned professionals looking to make a change.

The NALP recognized this opportunity and has completed rigorous research into how to win back job seekers while actively promoting career growth opportunities to a larger audience and specific niches, which has been very successful in recent years.  This includes establishing the H2B program, which allows for seasonal worker access, and building out a new worker pipeline with military-to-civilian transitions.

Another key area of focus for the industry's future is focusing on youth and connecting them to opportunities early on, often before their careers even start. These build awareness by exposing younger people to career opportunities and diverse options in the landscape industry.

The National Collegiate Landscape Competition (NCLC) is the largest intercollegiate landscape competition in North America, presented by NALP. Its mission is to bring together talented students from across the country to compete in a variety of real-world landscape and horticulture challenges. This event has several different components, including competitions, career fairs, networking, and student workshops.

Additionally, in 2024, the NALP Foundation announced an awareness initiative focusing on young people aged 5 to 15 through the online gaming platform Roblox. This initiative enables the younger generation to learn about landscape installation and maintenance through a game, providing exposure in a fun and engaging way! NALP reports that over 92,000 unique players have been drawn to this Roblox program since its founding.

Plus, events like SkillsUSA — a premier showcase of highly skilled career and technical education students — host championships, including a landscape competition for high schoolers to promote industry excellence.

Today, over 300,000 landscape professionals are hired every year in the United States, and there is a wide variety of exciting options with strong career path opportunities –  from outdoor experts to project managers and customer-facing roles. There are also specialized fields to focus on, including arboriculture, construction, sustainability, and more.

The NALP organization provides a career discovery website that is invaluable for job seekers. New talent is reached through a variety of programs such as career fairs, school visits for youth, and dedicated events for those seeking a career shift. 

Additionally, the Advisory Council program is dedicated to growing the profession with focused landscape networks in communities such as Latinos, Veterans, Women, and Young Professionals. All this hard work has achieved noteworthy results, with the landscaping industry's market size growing an average of over 5 percent per year between 2017 and 2022 in the United States.

With this in mind, it’s never been a better time to consider a landscape-focused career. Many tools and resources are available to achieve success, including groups like the NALP and solutions like Vectorworks Landmark – the ultimate landscape design software.

Featured image courtesy of NALP.