By Kim Tiber
It looks like spring is in full swing and things are getting busy at the Turfgrass Research and Outdoor Education (TROE) Center. We’ve recently gotten our irrigation system up and running for the year and have started mowing and applying herbicides and fertilizers.
I’ve also been spending some time hiring, onboarding and training new student employees who will be helping us throughout the summer. Our student workers are a valuable resource and without them we would not be able to do everything we do.These students help us with everything from mowing, weeding, and planting to data entry (Figure 1). Student employees gain great work experience and we also want them to have a great experience working with us.
Attracting applicants to green industry jobs such as our student jobs at TROE can be challenging, but seasonal labor is a great way to introduce new employees into the green industry. Seasonal workers often have little to no previous experience. Many managers want to hire the experienced employee who can hit the ground running. But the experienced employee had to start somewhere, too. We need to be more willing to help create the experienced employee instead of just grumbling about our lack of strong candidates.
I remind myself during this busy time of year, when it seems like it would be easier to just do it myself, that I should slow down and teach one of my student employees a new skill. Through this experience, the student might find out they love working outside everyday, enjoy working in a greenhouse, or they like operating equipment. This might be their first step in making this industry a career, whether it’s on a golf course, a greenhouse, parks and recreation, landscaping, research or any other part of the green industry. So I remind myself to take some extra time to teach them to be safe and do the job well. It’s an investment that will start paying off for me in a couple of weeks when they start mastering these tasks but also an investment in their future and in our future green industry workforce.