A bit of a binary choice, and of course like most small businesses, we need to do both. Our team is a great mix of people who have joined us with little or no experience of tree surgery and those with all the existing experience and qualifications we need. We’re delighted to say that we have a loyal team who’ve been with us for many years and live our values of Professional, Friendly and Reliable like they’re tattooed on! Alongside providing good service to our commercial and domestic customers, one of the things that we love the most is to spot, develop and bring on the potential and talent of the youngsters who join us. Over the years, we’ve taken on a number of “second jobbers”, young men (and only men so far – where are the young female tree surgeons?) who have started in the business and are ready for a next move, or students straight from college who have their qualifications but little or no experience. In both cases, it takes on average two years to build the knowledge, behaviour and practical skills to make a full contribution to the business in this highly specialised work; it’s a steep (high?) learning curve on lots of levels and some new entrants decide that the full climbing role isn’t for them. Thankfully there is so much variety in the work, and in running a small business, that we have been able to design roles for the people who “get” our customer service values and work hard alongside the rest of the team to allow them to contribute their value in many different ways.
This is Oliver. Over the Summer, he continued working with us to build his work experience. As a level 2 student of arboriculture at Sparsholt, he’s on track to begin a career in the industry when he finishes his studies, and sensibly, he sniffed out an informal placement with us to get some practical skill sunder his belt. In the weeks he was with us, he made himself useful, used plenty of initiative and started to develop some tidy hedge trimming capabilities! It’s a big thing to ask our team to take the responsibility of supporting a learner in what is invariably very risky environment. But like us, they get the enormous value of supporting and developing the potential in others. We all have to start somewhere and we’re very pleased to be able to be able occasionally to offer that start to local Basingstoke young people. If you’d like a quote for works to your trees and shrubs, please call Andrew on 01256 817369, 07771 883061 or email him at Andrew@primarytreesurgeons.co.uk