The Economics of Training Arborists: How Productive Trainee Labour Can Fund Development

It is tempting to look at a trainee and see an additional wage, a slow climber and the resulting loss of output from an experienced arborist who can no longer produce normally because they are supervising. These costs are real, but they begin from an incomplete view of labour.

In an arboriculture business, labour is not merely the largest operating cost. It is the primary means through which work is produced and revenue is created. A trainee should therefore not be assessed only by what they cost, or by how quickly they can perform the most technical task in the occupation. A more appropriate measure is what productive capacity they can create across the whole operation, and whether some of that capacity can finance the slower, supervised work through which they develop.

This changes the economics of training. Developing an arborist inevitably involves periods in which immediate costs exceed immediate output. Practice climbs are slow, an experienced worker must divert attention from production to supervise, and the rest of the crew may be forced to move at the trainee's pace. Quality and property-damage risks can increase while theory, assessment and administration consume further time.

These losses cannot simply be removed. If trainees never receive protected practice, the industry cannot develop experienced arborists. The operational challenge is to organise the rest of the trainee's work so that independently useful tasks create a productive surplus, which can then offset the deliberately expensive periods of development.

The central proposition of this article is simple:

Properly utilised trainee labour can generate enough productive surplus to finance the practice through which the trainee becomes an arborist.

This is not an argument for calculating the value of every saved minute to the dollar. Arboriculture production is too interdependent and variable for that level of precision to be credible. Instead, it is an argument for understanding the general economic trajectory. If the benefits created during training broadly cover the costs of development, the training period can stand on its own feet as a rational business decision. If it remains negative, retention after training becomes necessary to recover the investment, while a situation in which expected costs exceed likely benefits even after retention is considered makes declining to train economically rational.

An industry facing that final situation cannot solve it by repeatedly telling employers that they have a responsibility to train; it has to change the economics to which those employers are responding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MMcDSnZCH0

Want to drastically cut your arborist training costs? In this video James Isaacs runs through some low-effort, high-impact measures that can help utilise the trainee's own labour production to cover their own professional development

Training requires deliberate productivity losses

The most visible cost of a trainee is their wage, but it is rarely the most important training cost. Consider a practice climb in which the trainee is likely to complete the work more slowly than an experienced climber while a capable arborist supervises rather than producing normally. The supervisor's attention may be split between their own task and the trainee, while ground staff, machinery and the next stage of the job may all move at the pace of the learning task. The trainee may also produce work that needs correction or make decisions that a more experienced worker would have avoided.

The practice climb can therefore cost the company several times over because it consumes the trainee's time, the trainer's productive attention and some proportion of the wider crew's capacity. None of this makes the climb wasteful. It may provide exactly the repeated experience required to develop judgement that cannot be acquired from a workbook or demonstrated once in a training yard.

In my research into New Zealand arboriculture, employers repeatedly described this supervision constraint. They do not simply need people who hold entry-level qualifications; they need experienced arborists who can work safely without close supervision and eventually lead the work of others. Those people take years to develop, and the number of entry-level workers who can be added at any one time is limited by the existing workforce's ability to absorb the supervision burden.

This creates an uncomfortable loop in which the industry hires trainees because it needs experienced arborists, but those trainees initially consume the time of the same experienced arborists who are already in short supply. When that relationship is poorly organised, adding trainees can intensify the immediate capacity constraint before it begins to resolve it. The answer is not to suppress the practice through which competence is developed, but to find productive work elsewhere in the trainee's task portfolio that can help pay for it.

The training account

A useful way to understand this relationship is to imagine that every trainee has a training account. Some activities make deposits because the trainee can perform them safely and with sufficient independence to add more value than they consume. That value may come from creating output directly, preventing a crew or machine from waiting, or releasing an experienced worker from a task that does not require scarce technical capability.

Other activities make withdrawals from the account. Practice climbs, close supervision and slower technical work are obvious examples, but the same category also includes course fees, licence costs, theory support, assessment, rework and the operational disruption associated with learning. These withdrawals differ in form, yet they all draw on the productive resources available to the business.

The account is cumulative, so a sensible training system does not require every hour to be immediately productive. Some of the most important developmental hours will necessarily be costly, and a business that attempts to remove all such hours will eventually remove development itself. The more useful question is whether deposits made elsewhere allow the company to protect those hours without making the overall arrangement uneconomic.

The account can follow three broad trajectories. In the first, the trainee's productive contribution during training broadly covers the developmental withdrawals, meaning that the training period is directionally self-supporting. The employer does not need the worker to remain for years after qualification merely to justify having trained them, although retaining a capable arborist still creates a much larger later benefit.

In the second trajectory, the account remains negative during training but becomes strongly positive if the person stays and produces as a capable arborist. Firms with relatively strong retention, a credible internal career path or sufficient confidence in the employment relationship may rationally operate this model because they can bank on at least part of the later return. In the third trajectory, expected development costs exceed both the trainee's contribution and the realistic later benefit available to the employer, making refusal to add another trainee rational even where the firm urgently needs skilled staff.

These trajectories are more useful than a fictional dollar-perfect account because many of the important operational effects are emergent. Five minutes saved while a truck is positioned could change the anchor point a crew leader has time to establish, whether machinery is ready when the first branch reaches the ground, or whether the job develops momentum rather than delay. It would be impossible to isolate the later effect cleanly from everything that follows, but direction remains observable. A crew that repeatedly continues producing while a trainee performs necessary work is on a different trajectory from one that repeatedly stops so a skilled arborist can perform the same task, and the inability to price every downstream consequence does not make that difference disappear.

Measure the crew, not the visible task

The training account only makes sense when the whole crew, rather than the trainee's visible task, is treated as the unit of analysis. Arboriculture is an interdependent production system in which climbing, rigging, lowering, processing, chipping, loading, driving, machinery operation and client communication often need to occur in a particular relationship. At any given moment, the crew's output may be limited by whichever capability is missing or occupied elsewhere.

For this reason, the apparent technical difficulty of a trainee's task reveals relatively little about its organisational value. A trainee working in a tree may appear highly utilised while a supervisor and ground crew must be slowed to their pace. By contrast, a trainee driving a truck may appear to be performing lower-skilled work while two experienced arborists continue producing because the truck can leave to dump without them. Although the first task is more recognisably arboricultural, the second may create more immediate productive value.

The relevant comparison is therefore not between the trainee and an experienced arborist performing the same isolated task. It is between total safe crew output with and without the trainee's capability, including the work that other people can continue or begin because that capability is present.

This is one reason labour should be viewed as productive capacity before it is viewed as cost. A lower-paid worker is not necessarily cheap if their limitations suppress the output of everyone around them, just as a highly paid arborist is not necessarily expensive if their capability gets an entire crew moving faster. It is equally inefficient to consume that arborist's time on routine work merely because they are capable of doing it.

Training economics improves when tasks are allocated according to the capability they require and the production they enable, rather than according to habit, status or whoever happens to be available. The aim is not simply to keep each person occupied, but to organise the combination of labour so that scarce capability remains concentrated where it has the greatest effect.

A truck licence can be a training investment

A Class 2 truck licence is a useful example because it initially appears unrelated to the central task of developing an arborist. In many New Zealand tree companies, however, the most experienced arborist is also one of the few people able to drive the truck. That worker may simultaneously be the crew leader, climber, feller, machine operator or the person making the difficult decisions on site, so when the truck leaves for a dump run the business can lose far more than a driver. It can temporarily lose the production bottleneck around which the rest of the crew is organised.

Giving a suitable trainee a Class 2 licence can reverse that relationship. The trainee acquires an independently useful capability, sometimes long before they can climb or perform technical tree work without close supervision, while the truck can be emptied without removing scarce skilled capability from the site. The climber can continue climbing and machinery can continue processing material, which means the trainee is not merely being kept busy; their work is protecting the productive capacity of others.

The same mechanism can operate during the first few minutes of a job, when reversing and positioning a truck may require considerable attention and repeated adjustments. If no other capable driver is available, the crew leader may need to complete this task before properly speaking with the client, confirming the scope, accounting for changes on site and establishing the technical work. With a capable trainee driver, these activities can happen in parallel as the truck is positioned while the crew leader handles the client and begins setting up the work.

The direct time saving may be small, but the effect can be much larger if it gets the critical path moving earlier or gives the crew leader time to establish a better access, climbing or rigging solution. The trainee's driving capability allows more work to occur in parallel and protects the opening momentum of the job, rather than diverting scarce technical capability into transport and mobilisation.

Obtaining the licence creates an early withdrawal from the training account because the course costs money and consumes time, while also creating a portable credential that the trainee could take elsewhere. Repeated driving, mobilisation and dump-run deposits can nevertheless repay that investment operationally and contribute towards the cost of later climbing practice.

Driving does not itself create an arborist, and a system that keeps the trainee behind the wheel because that is where they are most immediately productive has failed developmentally. The licence is valuable because it makes expensive technical development more affordable, not because it replaces that development.

Acquire the lowest-cost independent capabilities first

The truck example is an enabling capability because it creates current value primarily by releasing somebody else. A stronger training pathway will also develop compounding capabilities, which produce useful work in the present while reducing the cost or difficulty of learning more advanced tasks later. This suggests a general sequencing rule:

Before adding height, movement and rescue complexity, build independent competence in the transferable part of the task wherever a safer, lower-cost production context exists.

The dismantling of suitable small trees from the ground illustrates the principle. Under appropriate supervision and risk mitigation, this work can give a trainee repeated experience with saw control, cut selection, holding wood, section behaviour and what happens when a cut does not respond exactly as expected. The trainee begins to acquire a practical feel for timber and task sequence without simultaneously having to manage work positioning, aerial movement, dropzone control and the constraints of being aloft.

This can also be genuinely productive work, particularly where one part of the job continues while the trainee develops the skill rather than the entire crew stopping for a single practice climb. Once the transferable components can be performed reliably on the ground, the trainer has fewer unfamiliar variables to explain and monitor when those same components are incorporated into aerial work. Early productivity and later development are therefore not competing outcomes in this instance; the work that contributes now also reduces the supervisory burden of the next stage.

None of this implies that ground dismantling is safe by default or that every small tree is suitable for training. Chainsaw and felling work remains hazardous, and the consequences of an error depend heavily on the site. The point is to control the number of unfamiliar variables introduced at once so that, where the work can be designed appropriately, competence develops in layers rather than requiring the trainee to learn cutting, movement, positioning, aerial judgement and worksite control simultaneously.

A productive capability ladder might begin with site routines, equipment handling and ground operations before moving through driving and mobilisation, suitable independent ground production, low-complexity aerial work and progressively more demanding climbing, felling, rigging or machine work. Each stage should establish a genuine capability that contributes to production, lowers the cost of the next stage, or achieves both at once.

The order will not be identical in every company because the available work, equipment, clients, geography and crew capability differ. A utility contractor, municipal tree team and residential company will each have different opportunities for early productive contribution. The underlying principle is to search deliberately for independent capabilities that can be acquired early, rather than treating a trainee as a generic extra pair of hands until they somehow become useful.

For crew leaders, this provides a more practical standard than simply asking whether a trainee can be given a climb that day. The better questions are what the person can already do independently, which transferable capability should come next, and whether the work can be arranged so that developing it does not unnecessarily suppress the whole site. This is not the denial of opportunity; it is the deliberate design of a development sequence.

Theory delivery may be the cost that tips the account negative

Physical training is not the only withdrawal from the account. In New Zealand arboriculture, theory delivery and assessment can consume a surprising amount of employer and trainer time because paper workbooks require trainees to produce written answers across unit after unit. Having been directly involved in this process over many years, I have seen employers, workplace trainers and assessors spend substantial time explaining questions, checking answers, writing comments, returning incomplete work and working through resubmissions, in addition to the further demands created by practical evidence and workplace verification.

Some of this human involvement is essential. An experienced person should verify that a trainee performs hazardous work consistently rather than merely accepting that they can describe it, and no multiple-choice quiz can replace judgement, contextual questioning or authentic workplace observation. The problem is not the use of expert time where expertise is genuinely required, but the consumption of that time by standard content and routine checking that could be delivered more effectively in another form.

A 2025 Scarlatti study commissioned by ConCOVE and BCITO shows that this burden is neither peculiar to arboriculture nor simply anecdotal. Of the 317 construction employers surveyed, 62% said they reviewed their apprentices' workbooks. Across provider-related activities—which also included meeting training advisers and completing evidence or paperwork—employers reported an average of 4.8 supervisor hours per apprentice each month, while apprentices spent a further 5.7 hours. These figures should not be read as workbook-marking time alone, but they demonstrate the scale at which employer and apprentice time is being absorbed by the formal training interface.

The report attempts to convert this and other employer contributions into a dollar estimate, but its authors are appropriately cautious about the assumptions involved. For this argument, the observed activities and time are more important than the headline number. They confirm that provider engagement is a material part of the training workload and that routine theory administration competes with production and practical skill transfer for the same limited pool of attention.

Much of the underlying factual theory does not require repeated manual handling. Terminology, basic concepts, recall, diagrams and routine knowledge checks can be taught and tested online with immediate feedback, as large online learning systems have already demonstrated at enormous scale. NZQA's online-assessment guidance allows multimedia, online questioning and digital feedback while retaining requirements for validity and authenticity.

The objective should not be to scan the existing workbook and place it on a screen, as this would digitise the friction without redesigning the process. Standard content and routine feedback should be automated where appropriate, allowing human trainer time to be concentrated on explaining genuine points of difficulty, applying theory to real trees and sites, developing practical judgement and verifying performance that requires expert observation.

Current New Zealand programme materials and provider guidance still place substantial responsibilities on workplace supervisors and subject-matter experts. They are expected to observe performance, question learners, provide feedback, help develop evidence and contribute to assessment decisions. Much of this is legitimate and valuable, but it draws on the same scarce experienced-worker capacity required for operational production and practical skill transfer.

This is not an argument that providers, advisers or assessors are failing to do their jobs. In many cases they are working conscientiously within a process that has accumulated around valid requirements for quality and authenticity. The design question is whether each step still requires manual attention, whether it is being performed by the right person, and whether the same educational result could be achieved with less friction for the apprentice and employer.

This becomes particularly important when the training account is already close to balance. No individual workbook is likely to determine whether a company employs another trainee, yet repeated explanation, checking, marking, verification and administration across an apprenticeship can become the final burden that moves an otherwise marginal training period from broadly self-supporting into a net cost. Small avoidable withdrawals matter when they are added to a system already operating near its limit.

Once expected training costs exceed the benefits available to the employer, avoiding another trainee and attempting to recruit an experienced arborist from elsewhere becomes individually rational. If enough firms make that decision, however, the industry produces too few experienced workers because each company is waiting for somebody else to incur the development burden. The strategy may make sense at firm level while failing the industry collectively.

Temporary subsidies can change the decision by absorbing part of the withdrawal and may be useful during a severe shortage, but they are a buffer rather than a solution to the underlying design problem. If the arrangement is viable only while exceptional funding remains available, the productive constraint has been hidden rather than removed. A stronger industry objective is to make the training period itself a rational option under ordinary operating conditions.

Theory delivery is therefore not a peripheral complaint about paperwork; it is part of the economics that determine how many training positions employers can sustain. Training institutions also have an interest in reducing the burden because employers that can support more trainees create more enrolments, completions and future workplace trainers. The provider and employer are not on opposite sides of this problem.

Apprenticeship research supports the mechanism

The wider apprenticeship literature provides strong support for treating trainee task allocation as a central economic variable. Samuel Mühlemann and Stefan Wolter's review of apprenticeship systems shows that trainees create benefits through productive work while firms incur wages, trainer time and other development costs. Importantly, firms do not always rely on retaining graduates to recover those costs. In the Swiss surveys reviewed, the majority of training firms generated a positive return during the apprenticeship itself, even though many apprentices left soon after completion.

The comparison of German and Swiss firms by Regina Dionisius and her colleagues is especially relevant because the researchers found that much of the difference between the higher net-cost German model and the positive-return Swiss model could be explained by the proportion and type of productive tasks allocated to apprentices, alongside relative wages and time spent in the firm. Task allocation was not a minor operational detail; it materially changed the employer's training economics.

OECD analysis reaches a similar conclusion, showing that apprentices become progressively productive as they are integrated into real work and that the way firms combine skilled and unskilled productive tasks affects the return from training. However, this research also introduces an important warning: a firm can improve its immediate account by overusing trainees on routine productive work while failing to develop the full occupation.

Research by Jürg Schweri, Manuel Aepli and Andreas Kuhn adds a further consideration. Standardised apprenticeship curricula impose costs where required content does not align with the production work available in a particular firm. Although common standards provide obvious benefits, the research demonstrates that curriculum design is not economically neutral because both required content and its mode of delivery affect how readily employers can combine learning with productive work. A good example of this is the planting unit in arboriculture. Most smaller firms do not offer planting at all and must manufacture such training opportunities, often at significant cost. 

The New Zealand evidence is smaller and concentrated in construction, but it points in the same direction. A 2014 study by Blake Hogarth and Linda Kestle examined four medium-to-large Auckland construction firms whose managers had collectively been responsible for 47 apprentices. The study found an overall financial cost during the four-year training period, with supervision among the main costs, while participants considered the longer-term business and industry benefits to outweigh that early burden. The sample is too small to generalise across New Zealand, but the pattern is directly relevant.

BCITO modelling reported in 2016 by BRANZ identified the cost-benefit break-even point to be  near the end of a carpentry apprenticeship, followed by increasing cumulative benefits where the trained person remained with the firm. The publicly available article does not provide enough methodological detail to treat its estimates as definitive, but its trajectory closely resembles the second training-account path described here: The training period does not necessarily support itself, so retention becomes part of the economic case.

New Zealand therefore has relevant evidence, but not a nationally representative and periodically repeated employer cost-benefit survey comparable with the German and Swiss research, and no equivalent study appears to exist for arboriculture. International figures should not be transferred directly because apprenticeship rules, wage structures, labour markets and firm composition differ. The more defensible conclusion is that the same underlying mechanisms—productive contribution, trainer displacement, curriculum, firm scale and retention—are operating in different institutional settings.

This literature does not establish that any particular arboriculture pathway is self-supporting. It does, however, establish that productive task allocation, supervision, curriculum and retention are legitimate determinants of employer training decisions, while the arboriculture examples described here apply that established economic mechanism to the realities of tree work.

Firm scale changes the training economics

Firm size affects how readily those mechanisms can be organised. Mühlemann and Wolter found that Swiss firms with fewer than ten employees were substantially less likely to train than firms with more than 100 employees. The exact threshold belongs to the Swiss setting and should not be treated as a universal dividing line, but the underlying constraint is readily recognisable in New Zealand arboriculture, where many companies operate with only one or two crews.

A larger employer can move trainees across a wider range of jobs, match practice to appropriate sites, distribute supervision among several capable arborists and spread fixed administrative demands across a larger training system. It is also more able to absorb course attendance, mistakes, uneven progress and the temporary loss of one trainer without stopping a substantial share of production. Once an apprentice becomes capable, a larger business has more room to retain that person while continuing to recruit and train the next intake.

The same decision is more exposed in a small company. One trainee can represent a large share of the workforce, while one supervising arborist may also be the owner, estimator, crew leader and main production bottleneck. A poorly timed practice task or block course can therefore suppress a much larger proportion of the firm's total capacity, and fixed administration consumes a greater share of the resources available for training.

This does not mean that firms below ten people cannot train effectively, nor that a qualified apprentice necessarily occupies the only position available for the next one. In a growing labour-constrained firm, the newly capable arborist may expand production, lead another crew and eventually help train the next entrant. The more useful conclusion is that scale creates additional options for organising trainee labour, but deliberate system design can substitute for some of that advantage. A well-organised small firm can train intensively, while a large employer can still waste trainee and trainer capacity if task allocation is poor.

Retention changes which training models are viable

Retention should be treated neither as the only way training creates a return nor as irrelevant to the decision. Where the training period is already self-supporting, retaining the person allows the employer to capture the much larger value created by an independently capable arborist. The firm also avoids external recruitment and induction costs, gains operational resilience and may develop a future crew leader or trainer, meaning that retention multiplies the return rather than rescuing the original training decision.

Where the training account remains negative, retention becomes more important because the employer is effectively relying on the employee's potential future contribution to fund the development period. A company with a stable workforce, strong employment relationships and credible progression may rationally accept a larger early deficit than a firm expecting high turnover, since it has greater reason to believe the arborist will remain and contribute once fully trained.

The early period can be particularly exposed because a truck licence, external course or block of formal training is paid for before its value has accumulated. The resulting credential belongs to the trainee, who can leave and take it to an employer that did not fund it, so employers are understandably concerned about financing portable development without any guarantee of retention.

However, organising the employment relationship around the assumption that people will leave can help create the conditions in which they do so. If portable development is withheld, progression is delayed and the trainee is treated as temporary labour, the firm provides fewer reasons for that person to build a future there. A system designed on the expectation of continuation is more likely to offer investment, responsibility and a visible pathway, all of which can make continuation more attractive.

This does not imply that people remain simply out of gratitude. Training can increase mobility precisely because it makes the person more valuable to competing employers, while retention still depends on the quality of the work, pay, treatment, leadership, flexibility and future role available. The stronger point is that employers should distinguish blind faith from a deliberately constructed expectation of continuation, supported by employment conditions that make staying a credible option.

The industry should not attempt to make every firm indifferent to retention, since mature capability is where the largest benefit lies. A more realistic objective is to reduce the number of training positions that are rational only if the employer adopts an unrealistically optimistic retention assumption.

Productive development is not cheap labour

The obvious risk in this argument is that employers focus on deposits while neglecting development. A trainee who spends years driving, dragging brush or performing repetitive routine tasks may make a substantial short-term contribution without developing into an arborist. This is not a successful training account; it is the substitution of lower-cost labour for genuine skill formation.

The economic trajectory must therefore be considered alongside a capability trajectory. Employers should be able to identify the independent capabilities a trainee has gained, what is intended to come next, which productive tasks are funding development and whether those tasks are beginning to crowd development out.

Enabling tasks such as driving may need to be capped or rotated, while protected practice will sometimes need to remain protected even when production pressure makes it quicker for the experienced worker to take over. Progression should introduce increasingly complex work as the relevant precursor skills become reliable. The test is not whether the trainee remains busy or recovers their wage, but whether current task allocation creates value while preserving a credible path towards independent occupational capability.

Alison Fuller and Lorna Unwin describe a related distinction between expansive and restrictive apprenticeship environments. An expansive environment gives the learner access to broader knowledge, varied participation and a developing occupational identity, whereas a restrictive environment narrows participation around the employer's immediate labour requirement. The training account should be used to make expansive development economically possible, not to justify restriction.

The industry needs more economically viable training places

Arboriculture does not merely have a shortage of people who have entered training. Its more consequential shortage is experienced capability that can be deployed without close supervision. Increasing entry without increasing the system's ability to develop people can therefore add pressure to already constrained trainers and crews without producing a corresponding increase in useful capacity.

The more useful industry question is not only how to attract additional trainees, but how to make a greater number of high-quality trainee positions economically viable. For employers, this requires early capability, truck and machinery requirements, crew composition, task sequencing, job mobilisation, skilled-time deployment, theory support and progression to be examined as one connected system. The most effective intervention may not initially resemble training. For example, a driving licence, different crew allocation or redesigned job-start routine can change the productive capacity available to finance later technical practice.

Training institutions must likewise treat employer time as a scarce input. Every hour spent on avoidable explanation, manual marking or duplicated evidence competes with operational production and practical skill transfer. Digital delivery should not remove expert judgement, but it should protect expert time from work that a well-designed system can perform more consistently and efficiently.

For industry bodies and government, the objective should be to improve the conditions under which training occurs rather than simply increasing pressure on employers or subsidising a poorly organised model. Financial support can alter the balance, but task design, curriculum, supervision capacity and the productive use of labour determine whether training remains viable once that support changes.

The effects can become cumulative. When trainee labour becomes useful early, the net burden associated with each position falls, allowing more employers to take on trainees or existing employers to take on a greater number. As those people progress, some become independent arborists and eventually trainers, expanding the industry's capacity to develop the next group.

The opposite cycle is equally plausible. If trainees consume more capacity than they create for too long, employers restrict the number of places available; fewer people then progress to experienced capability, the supervision bottleneck tightens and each subsequent trainee becomes harder to absorb. The difference between these cycles is not primarily employer goodwill, but the design of the workforce system.

Conclusion

Training an arborist should include slow climbs, close supervision, mistakes corrected before they become habits, and technical experiences that make little immediate financial sense. Removing those withdrawals would make training cheaper only by making it ineffective, so the economic task is not to eliminate them but to ensure sufficient productive capacity is created elsewhere in order to finance them.

When trainee labour is treated as productive capacity, employers can identify early independent work that creates direct output, releases scarce skilled people and develops transferable capability. Driving, mobilisation and logistics can enable production, while carefully sequenced ground work can produce useful output and lower the cost of later aerial development. Better theory delivery can meanwhile protect expert time for the aspects of training that genuinely require it.

The aim is not a perfect calculation but a better trajectory. We need to build systems which allow sufficient productive surplus to keep necessary development economically rational, organised progression that ensures useful trainees become capable arborists, and employment conditions strong enough to retain the arborists so the benefits can compound.

If the arboriculture industry wants more employers to train, it must make training a better production decision.

References and further reading

• Dionisius, R., Mühlemann, S., Pfeifer, H., Walden, G., Wenzelmann, F. and Wolter, S. C. (2008). Cost and Benefit of Apprenticeship Training: A Comparison of Germany and Switzerland. IZA Discussion Paper No. 3465.

• Fuller, A. and Unwin, L. (2003). Learning as Apprentices in the Contemporary UK Workplace: Creating and Managing Expansive and Restrictive Participation. Journal of Education and Work, 16(4), 407-426.

• Gambin, L., Hasluck, C. and Hogarth, T. (2010). Recouping the Costs of Apprenticeship Training: Employer Case Study Evidence from England. Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training, 2(2), 127-146.

• Hogarth, B. and Kestle, L. (2014). The Cost and Value of Carpentry Apprenticeships to Employers in the Auckland and Wider New Zealand Construction Industry. Building a Better New Zealand Conference Proceedings.

• Isaacs, J. (2021). Skill Mismatches and Worker Shortages in the New Zealand Arboriculture Industry. Master of Business Studies thesis, Massey University.

• Lerman, R. I. (2014). Do Firms Benefit from Apprenticeship Investments?. IZA World of Labor.

• McGuire, G. (2016). It Pays to Train. BRANZ Build, 153.

• Mühlemann, S. (2016). The Cost and Benefits of Work-based Learning. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 143.

• Mühlemann, S. and Wolter, S. C. (2014). Return on Investment of Apprenticeship Systems for Enterprises: Evidence from Cost-Benefit Analyses. IZA Journal of Labor Policy, 3(25).

• New Zealand Qualifications Authority. Online Assessment: Guidance for Providers.

• Primary ITO (2026). Learner and Employer Information Handbook.

• Primary ITO. New Zealand Apprenticeship in Arboriculture.

• Primary ITO. The Workplace Verifier's Role.

• Scarlatti (2025). Employer Contributions to Apprenticeships: Findings Report for ConCOVE and BCITO.

• Schweri, J., Aepli, M. and Kuhn, A. (2021). The Costs of Standardized Apprenticeship Curricula for Training Firms. Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training, 13(16).

About the author

James Isaacs is an arboricultural workforce strategist at Ostix Consulting. His Master of Business Studies research examined skill mismatches and worker shortages in New Zealand arboriculture. His work draws on experience as an arboriculture business owner, field arborist and organisational improvement practitioner.