Pros
-Starting hourly pay is government contract pay, therefore it was good -Very good people to work with between other employees and management. -Zero stress, you don’t take any work home at the end of the day and on the job is no stress whatsoever -Occasionally you will be placed in very cool and nice areas in beautiful forests, near rivers, streams, reservoirs, etc. -Gear and equipment provided is good -initial training period is good, lasts about a month and then you’re sort of in training with a crew for another month. It’s a good system and you learn a lot. -Pay for certifications -Very affordable and quality insurance -Good and growing company that had other opportunities nation wide -they offer overtime Saturday work every single weekend and on some holidays for double pay (stay tuned for cons section to read how this doesn’t make up for the reality of what this job actually is) -good stepping stone job, helps you break into the arboriculture field without having to do the back breaking or undesirable work you normally think of when first starting out with this industry (like working on a tree care crew). -plant/tree ID! This is a very good pro, you will take this skill with you moving forward for the rest of your life. You learn not only many trees, but how to identify trees you don’t know!
Cons
-Beyond the initial 3-6 months of employment here, there is essentially no more experience or knowledge to gain. You plateau in gaining good work experience immediately. It hits you extremely fast and you essentially become an expert at the surveyor position in 6 months. So if you’ve been there for 3 years, you barely have anything to show for compared to someone that’s been there for 6 months - 1 year. This job is good for someone just right out of college to work for 1-2 years maximum! Maximum cannot be stressed enough, unless you become a crew lead, by staying here any longer than that, you will be holding yourself back as a person and in your professional career. You hear about and meet people here that have been just surveyors for 3-4 years and they have had no advancement or significant opportunities! That is painful to hear about because it’s essentially so much time wasted. -Combined with the first con above, the worst part about this job is the simple lack of an ability to move up in the company or even at the very least, gain additional quality experience beyond the tedious act of surveying trees. -The tedious act of essentially only surveying trees - this is perhaps person specific, but just about everyone there will agree that there should be at least 1 or 2 more major job duties for surveyors. The job is quite simply put, scanning trees all day for signs of beetle damage. -Management is invisible, they do there best to stay at the office or work on other projects and not interact with surveyors. This didn’t bother me very much, but I know it bothered a lot of people. -The monotony of the job leads to a lot of gossip. You can’t go into a new team or work with a new partner without an amount of gossip being spoken. -This job is just horrendously boring! This is coming from someone who loves the outdoors...being outside all day doing 1 thing in this position is extremely boring. Towards the end of my time here, I was only looking forward to breaks and chatting with my partner. -This is the final straw for many people - the hourly rate is quite good for what the job is, but that is a cover up for how much money you’ll actually make. You don’t work when it rains or snows and often not the day or so after any sort of storm! You do know this going it, but they don’t stress how significant it can be seasonally and how you don’t know if you will be working until the morning of at 5am. You end up averaging roughly 30/hours a week throughout the year, depending on if you work Saturdays, but still that might only get you up to 32-33 hours a week on average. You end up not making very much money at all here in this job. Not with it in my opion. -in summary, this job is good for someone right out of school for 1-2 years, someone needing a stepping stone for a year to get to a new opportunity, or someone that doesn’t want to work much and can handle monotony and no growth.
