Qualifications, tickets and experience

It'd be easy to say "just do the tickets" but it is more complex than that.

Qualifications L3 Arb

The actual name of the qualification I am “doing” at treeschool¹ is “City & Guilds Level 3 Advanced Technical Diploma in Arboriculture & Forestry” but we call it “L3 arb”. In the UK, “arb” is the shorthand term that we use for “tree surgery”. The course covers everything from soil and plant science, tree planting, forestry operations, chainsaws, felling trees, woodland management, climbing trees, pruning trees on the ground, aerial pruning, dismantling trees, estate skills, hedge laying, specialist machinery, work experience, plant pest & diseases, tree identification, trees and the law, and of course, the obligatory health and safety unit. The only thing it doesn’t cover is reversing small towed things on vans and pickups – I wish it did.

By the time the L3 Arb course finishes up in May of 2024, I hope to have attained the qualification and suitable verified knowledge, a drip of wisdom and good few dollops of experience in all of the above topics. In some ways my knowledge and “let me at it attitude” makes me ready for industry and in other ways the fact that I’ll have more knowledge than experience makes me a liability.

Tickets

There’s an add-on qualification that we do alongside our course which industry calls “tickets”. Truthfully, industry only cares about tickets. Few employers care about qualifications such as L3 arb and most seem to prefer people with tickets. I suspect it is because it makes their public liability insurance premiums easier to calculate. Insurance is a theme.

In the UK we have two organisations that issue “tickets”. There’s NPTC (National Proficiency Tests Council) and LANTRA (land + training) and whilst there’s some differences between the two, they are generally the same format. A ticket involves some training and then an assessment. The training is practical and happens over a day or two. There is always accompanying theory which you have to learn (or memorise like your lines in a performance – my strategy). The assessment takes place on the day after your practical training. It assesses both your practical knowledge and your theoretical knowledge. If you pass, you get the ticket, if you fail you don’t. People do fail tickets, but generally speaking it takes more effort to fail than it does to pass.

At the time of writing, I have eight tickets (although one is still processing due to Christmas).

1. Chainsaw maintenance & crosscutting (CS30)

2. Felling small trees up to 380mm (CS31)

3. Felling medium trees (380mm - 760mm) (CS32) (processing)

4. Climbing and Aerial rescue (CS38)

5. Chainsaw from a rope and harness (CS39)

6. Individual windfallen trees

7. Chipper

8. Basic tractor skills

No Qualifications

In the UK there are many fine, very skilled tree workers who essentially had no formal training or qualifications. If they did get tickets then they did so on their companies dime and only because they had to. One example that springs to mind is Reg Coates, a dude from somewhere around Cheshire who now lives and works in Canada. It isn’t a clearly stated legal requirement that you have tickets or qualifications to do treework in the UK. It is implied that you do via various bits of legislation such as PUWER, LOLER, Health & Safety at Work Act etc etc. Legislation uses terms such as “competent” and “trained” which are not clearly defined. Any suitably skilled law-monger could argue the case that “a decade(s) of experience” met the concept of competent and trained. “Qualified”, however, is a binary situation. You either have the qualifications or you don’t.

If you have no qualifications, you’re going to have a very hard time getting public liability insurance if you want to run your own business. If you just wanted to work for someone else and thought you could fly under the radar then think again. One of the first things that any reputable employer should do is ask for a copy of your tickets for their insurances. If they don’t ask, then you might want to consider who you’re working for.

The bottom line is that if you want decent work in the UK you need to have qualifications or tickets. If you don’t then you won’t be able to get that public liability insurance. Then you’ll be stuck pollarding butchering the trees of unsuspecting punters who just wanted their tree to be a bit smaller.

Tickets vs L3 Arb

So why bother doing L3 arb if all that is really needed are the tickets?

The most obvious answer is that you don’t need do L3 arb. There are plenty of “accelerated learning” courses that happen over 12 weeks that go from chainsaw maintenance and small felling all the way through to aerial rescue and chainsaw from a rope and harness. Depending on the person this could be a great route to go down. You only need 12 weeks of not earning a wage before you’re in a position start earning as a tree surgeon. The reason I didn’t go down this path was experience. You don’t get any actual experience on this route. You go from training to working with zero experience. I didn’t want to do that.

Another route I could have explored was doing the basic tickets (chainsaw maintenance + crosscutting and felling small trees) and then working as a tree surgeon and over time working on my tickets. I could have even done this in conjunction with treeschool as an apprenticeship. I’d have just needed a business to work for who’d sponsor me and I’d be earning and getting experience from day one. I didn’t go down this route for two reasons. One, because I didn’t know it was a route until I was already doing L3 arb and secondly, I’d have just been swapping one full time job (tech) for another (arb) and that’s not a Life of Treedom. That’s a job. Granted it is a job working on trees everyday² but it is ultimately a job. I’d be doing whatever I was told to do on a day to day basis which isn’t what I signed up for. I have always been clear that I’d be working for myself in my own company.

Fortunately, I was in a position to save up some runway cash for my career switch. This meant I didn’t have to earn straight away and I could take my time to introduce a wage over the two years of the L3 arb course. The reason I took these two years to do the L3 arb course was experience. Obviously there’s the classroom and learning experiences where I’m free of the constraints of production work (get to and complete as many jobs in a day as you can) but there’s also the work experience. This gives me a little modest income into the business to fatten the war chest but it also lets me experience first hand what it is like to be a member of a domestic arb team. It is invaluable and I’m extremely grateful to treecompany³ for this.

But there’s another dimension to experience and one that I’ll wrap up this little dry written piece with and that’s the experience of being around various industry people, interacting with them and exploring the opportunities that come with that.

I’ve met people doing tickets who’ve worked with me. For example when I cleared up the “birch on a birch on an oak in an oak” I worked with John whom I met on my individual windfall ticket. I’ll be doing some work for John shortly, clear-felling a PAWS (plantation on ancient woodland) site so that it can be re-planted with native broadleaves. There’s more examples of this but that’s a different story for another day.

Qualifications, tickets and experience are all important facets of learning a new trade. The exact mixture or route through them all being dependant on the person. I chose my route by chance as it presented itself out of nowhere and was the path of least resistance. I can do this, as I like to throw caution to the wind, plus I put myself in a situation where I didn’t have to start earning straight away. I also didn’t have a clear idea of where I was going – I just knew how I wanted to get there. Now as I draw closer to the end of the course I can start to see some destinations firming up. If I’d focused on qualifications or tickets only, I doubt I’d be at this point, but the truth is I’ll never know. But I do know that qualifications and tickets are where my experiences are coming from.

1. I call it treeschool as an abstraction. The name of the institution I’m doing L3 arb at is East Durham College. It is a technical college and not at all connected with Durham university colleges. I call it treeschool because “there are many like it, but this one is mine” and an abstraction helps keep the concept open to your context.

2. “Allegedly working on trees everyday”. As I am discovering at treecompany there are many days where all I do is clear brambles and pickup hedge trimmings from the ground. I don’t mind a bit of this kind of thing as it is part of “paying your dues” but it’s not the kind of thing I’m interested in doing day in day out.

3. I’m still keeping the name of the company I’m working for a private. I’ve not yet had the conversation about disclosing their name in my content.