working

[Le Sanglier]

Haven't the foggiest! Worcs Wuss seem to know all about it.

[WorcsWuss]

Without knowing your circumstances I can't send you anywhere specific, but you could try Business Link, speak to your local college or specialist training providers (they'll know if anyone has paid towards someone's training) or the youth organisations.

I'm an old fart now so things have changed a lot since I did mine but I'm sure there are schemes still out there, you just have to do a bit of legwork to track them down.

[Jack92]

okay then cheers thanks for your help everyone.

[KnotSure]

I am in a similar situation to yourself at the moment and have started to go down the self-employed route also. I want to retrain and develop the skills to work in the trees and going self employed then sub contracting yourself out to local firms seems a better option because finding a company to take you on as an apprentice and assist with putting you through training whilst working for minimum wage has proved exceedingly difficult for me.

 

Have been in touch with my local citizens advice bureau who guided me towards a few local charities and trusts who could help with low cost loans and grants for retraining. You will be able to open an ILA account which gives you £200 a year to put towards training, I have used mine to book onto a course to do my Chipper ticket, which is totally covered by it and gets me on the first limb of the tree . The most helpful one for me is the Princes Trust who here in Scotland have the PSYBT which is to help young unemployed people get the foot up (financially aswell as with relevant business skills) to start their own business and acquire the skills(in this case the nptc tickets) and tools needed to begin. I am soon to go on a 4 day course about business skills, run by them for free, and then will be assigned a mentor to help put together a business plan before going in front of their panel to see if they will support me with some of their start up grants. (upto a potential £4k I believe)

 

I have been very impressed with the Princes Trust so far and would recommend you getting in touch with them to see what they can do for you. It seems that Arboriculture is a hard field to break into but I believe you can do anything if you want it good enough and believe in yourself in a calm and assertive way. Personally I feel at my easiest and best in nature and that attitude combined with gradually gaining the experience needed will let me acheive what I want to.

 

Best of luck to you and hope some of that helps you to start in the right direction.

[Medium__Jake]

I'm also pretty new to the Arb world. Spent 8 years as a chef but got my CS30/31 tickets this time last year and have only really had any proper work from it (two jobs) last month! Part of that was working other jobs to pay for driving, which if you cant find much work near you, is a really necessary thing to get sorted. In fact, I wouldn't have been able to get the jobs I did without it!

 

Also, working hard and throwing yourself into the job even without all the skill and experience, is probably the best way to get repeat work. Try and find someone you can do brash clearing and/or chipping etc with and start from there.