Why Are Arborist Skills So Difficult to Come By?

Arboriculture depends on knowledge that cannot be separated from the people and crews performing the work. Because every tree, site and operating situation is different, technical competence alone does not create the judgement required to become an experienced arborist.

Arboriculture employers often describe their workforce problem as a shortage of experienced climbers, crew leaders or arborists capable of working without close supervision. Although recruitment and training volumes contribute to this problem, they do not fully explain why advanced arboricultural capability remains so difficult to find.

Part of the explanation lies in the nature of the work itself. Arborist skill is not simply the accumulated ability to perform a list of technical tasks. It is the integrated ability to interpret a changing situation, choose an appropriate method, organise the work, coordinate other people and adapt when the original plan no longer fits what is happening on site.

Someone could be taught every commonly used knot, climbing technique, pruning cut, rigging method and machine operation without necessarily becoming a capable arborist. Each of those competencies matters, but the person must also know which technique to use, when to use it, how it will affect the rest of the crew and whether the expected benefit justifies the risk it introduces.

This knowledge is difficult to create because much of it must remain inside the person or crew carrying out the work.

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Arboricultural knowledge must be present at the point of action

Some forms of work can be organised so that most important decisions are made before production begins. The product is standardised, the sequence is known and unusual cases can be referred to someone with greater authority. As the production system develops, knowledge can progressively be transferred out of individual workers and embedded in plans, software, machinery, procedures or management systems.

Arboriculture resists this degree of standardisation. A quotation, work specification, site plan and risk assessment can establish the required outcome, identify known hazards and determine which people and equipment should attend. However, these preparations cannot specify every decision that will be required once the work begins.

The person making a cut may need to consider the species, wood weight, branch structure, defects, wind, rigging geometry, available landing area, nearby targets and the capability of the ground crew. They must also consider what needs to happen after the piece has been cut, because an apparently successful decision can still create unnecessary work or constrain the next stage of the job.

Some of these factors are visible from the ground, while others only become apparent once the arborist is positioned in the tree, tension has been applied to the rigging system or the saw has entered the wood. A plan may therefore provide direction without removing the need for local judgement. In practice, the usefulness of the plan depends on the capability of the people interpreting it.

It is not uncommon for an arborist to make a subtle adjustment while completing a cut or to guide a piece after it has begun to move. They must also remain prepared for outcomes that were not predicted. An experienced arborist will often position their body, climbing system and equipment so that they retain suitable escape options if a branch moves unexpectedly, a section sits back on the saw or the fibres behave differently from anticipated.

Forestry provides a formalised example through the requirement to establish an escape route before felling a tree. In climbing arboriculture, a similar “what if” judgement is applied repeatedly throughout the job, although the appropriate response changes with the position of the arborist, the structure of the tree and the type of work being completed.

Procedures remain essential, but they cannot cover every combination of circumstances. They provide a framework within which skilled judgement operates rather than a substitute for that judgement.

No two trees and no two jobs are the same

The observation that no two trees are the same can sound like an industry cliché, but its importance lies in what this variability does to skill formation. An arborist does not encounter species, defects, access limitations, weather, equipment and client expectations as separate variables. Each job presents a different combination of them.

A familiar pruning technique applied to one tree may be inappropriate for another because of its species, condition, structure or location. A rigging method that is efficient in an open site may introduce an unacceptable risk above a glasshouse. A section that one ground crew can process comfortably may overwhelm a smaller or less experienced crew. A removal plan that appeared sensible at the beginning of the day may need to be reconsidered after decay is found or access proves more restrictive than expected.

Even where two trees are physically similar, the wider operating situation may be different. One may be located in an empty park, while the other is beside a road, fence, swimming pool or occupied building. The client may have different expectations, the crew may possess different capabilities and the commercial consequences of taking additional time may vary.

I recently observed a relatively simple example during a residential removal. The crew had to decide where to make the cut to fell the head out of the tree. Cutting it slightly lower would have saved a small amount of time but would also have marginally increased the chance of damaging a fence below. Under different conditions, accepting that limited risk might have been commercially reasonable. On this occasion, however, the company was short of work and the crew already had a light day, which meant there was almost no value in completing the job several minutes earlier. There was, however, a meaningful downside if even minor damage occurred. The crew made the cut higher and removed the additional uncertainty.

The technical options had not changed, but the appropriate decision had. The arborist needed to understand not only whether the lower cut could be completed, but also whether there was anything worth gaining by doing so.

This constant weighing of alternatives is also evident in pruning. The conventional three-cut method uses an undercut, a top cut and a final cut near the branch collar, substantially reducing the likelihood that bark will tear down the stem. It is reliable, easily explained and appropriate in many situations.

An experienced arborist may sometimes support the weight of a smaller branch and complete a clean final cut in one movement. When done successfully, the result can be equivalent and substantially faster, allowing more selective cuts to be made throughout the canopy. However, the method also increases the risk of tearing if the branch is too heavy, the species behaves unexpectedly or the arborist misjudges their ability to control it.

Neither method can be declared universally correct without reference to the branch, the tree, the arborist and the intended pruning outcome. The skill lies partly in performing the cut, but more importantly in recognising when the faster method remains appropriate and when the more controlled procedure is required.

Training cannot expose a person to every possible combination of conditions in advance. Experience instead develops the ability to recognise patterns, anticipate likely consequences and adapt known techniques to a situation that has not been encountered in exactly the same form before. The arborist is not merely remembering what happened on a previous tree; they are identifying which aspects of that experience are relevant to the tree now in front of them.

Competence in every task would not necessarily produce a capable arborist

Arboriculture can be divided into individual tasks for training and assessment. Someone can be taught to inspect climbing equipment, tie knots, ascend a tree, use a chainsaw, operate a chipper, install a lowering system, perform an aerial rescue and make specified pruning cuts. This division makes learning more manageable and provides a practical basis for determining whether defined competencies have been achieved.

The broader history of industrialisation shows why task division is attractive. Adam Smith’s pin factory demonstrated how production could be increased when a complicated process was separated into simple, repeatable activities. Later production systems extended this approach by transferring knowledge from skilled workers into machinery, procedures and specialised roles.

My research initially examined whether insufficient division of labour and deskilling might help explain arboriculture’s skill shortage. The industry has certainly adopted specialised machinery, separate roles and more structured processes, but it has proved remarkably resistant to the degree of deskilling achieved in more standardised industries. Even compared with forestry, arboriculture requires workers and crews to deal with a wider variety of jobs, site conditions and customer requirements.

The reason is that separating work into tasks does not remove the need to reintegrate those tasks into a complete job. Even if a person became competent in every assessable activity, they would still need to decide which method was appropriate, what should happen first, what could occur at the same time and when the original assumptions had become unreliable.

They would also need to balance objectives that do not always align neatly. The fastest method may introduce additional property risk, the safest method may impose unnecessary time and physical demands, and the best pruning outcome may not be what the client expected. The correct decision therefore depends on more than technical compliance. It requires an understanding of the entire operating situation.

A task assessment can determine whether someone is able to perform a technique under specified conditions. An arboricultural job requires them to select, combine and adapt multiple techniques while managing consequences that extend beyond their own activity.

This helps explain why a qualification and an experienced arborist are not interchangeable. A qualification provides evidence of formal learning and assessed competence, but it cannot compress years of varied operational exposure into a short programme. My 2021 research distinguished between qualified workers and those capable of producing reliably, working independently and leading a crew. The available industry requirements and employer accounts suggested that the latter capability could take approximately five years to develop, even where formal qualification occurred considerably earlier.

This is not a criticism of training institutes. Formal providers generally face an extremely difficult task, because arboriculture is expensive to teach and much of the necessary development can only occur through supervised commercial work. A training provider can establish technical foundations, but employers remain responsible for turning those foundations into operational capability.

Arboriculture is performed through a crew

Arborist capability cannot be understood by examining only the individual climber. Most field work is completed through a crew, and the productivity and safety of that crew depend on how the activities of its members interact.

Consider a straightforward tree dismantle. The climber removes branches while the ground crew clears, processes and transports the resulting material. If branches arrive more quickly than they can be moved, they begin to overlap and tangle. Each additional branch becomes harder to extract, meaning that the ground operation progressively constrains the entire job.

An inexperienced climber may continue cutting as quickly as possible because their own output appears productive. An experienced climber may recognise that this behaviour is slowing the crew and begin removing smaller sections, directing them into different areas or pausing until space has been restored. The climber may appear to be working more slowly while the complete job proceeds more quickly.

The best decision depends on the size and strength of the ground crew, the available space, the type of material, the machinery present and what work needs to occur next. The relevant unit of performance is therefore not always the individual arborist. It is often the operating system formed by the crew. This crew interdependence and the need to localise knowledge within the people doing the work were central features of the occupation described in my thesis.

A tree crew behaves in some respects like an operating system

A useful analogy is to think of an arboricultural crew as a small operating system. A computer operating system allocates scarce resources, manages dependencies, responds to interruptions and determines which processes should run at a given time. A tree crew must perform similar functions, although it does so through human judgement rather than predetermined code.

The resources available on a site may include an advanced climber, a developing arborist, an elevated work platform, a chipper, a truck, rigging equipment, a restricted landing area, a traffic-management window and a limited amount of time. Some activities can proceed in parallel, while others cannot begin until an earlier task has been completed. The main constraint can also shift repeatedly as the job progresses.

The bottleneck need not be an expensive machine or a highly skilled person. It can be something as simple as a rake. Suppose a site requires extensive clean-up but the crew has only one rake because the other was accidentally chipped on the previous job. If raking begins too late, several people may eventually be left waiting while one person finishes the entire area.

A capable crew leader may respond by changing the order of the work, completing one section first so that clean-up can begin while the rest of the crew moves elsewhere. The total amount of raking remains unchanged, but the waiting time at the end of the job is reduced because the constrained resource has been scheduled earlier.

This is a small example, but the same reasoning applies to more valuable resources. A highly capable climber, machine operator or elevated work platform can be left idle because another process has not been completed in time. Alternatively, scarce skilled labour can be consumed by work that another crew member could have performed if the site had been organised differently.

The operating environment also produces continual interruptions. Equipment fails, access changes, the client introduces new information, hidden decay is discovered, a branch behaves unexpectedly or a machine needs to be repositioned. The crew does not simply execute a fixed sequence. It continually interprets and reschedules the work.

A strong crew leader may coordinate much of this process, but the relevant knowledge remains distributed across the team. The climber can see conditions that are invisible from the ground. The ground crew can see rope behaviour and congestion within the landing area. The machine operator understands the limits of the machine, while a traffic controller or site representative may hold information about conditions outside the immediate work zone.

The crew performs well when this local information is recognised, communicated and incorporated into the next decision quickly enough.

Arborist skill is also interpersonal

The technical aspects of arboriculture are highly visible, but much of an experienced arborist's value comes from coordinating the work of other people. Because tree work is carried out by crews rather than individuals, technical skill must continually be translated into coordinated action. This depends not only on technical competence, but also on communication, shared understanding, anticipation and trust.

A capable arborist must communicate clearly enough for others to act safely while also recognising what colleagues have understood, what they have missed and when an instruction has been interpreted differently from what was intended. This communication often occurs in a noisy environment where chainsaws, chippers, machinery, hearing protection and physical distance limit normal conversation. Crews rely on hand signals, gestures, brief calls and established patterns of behaviour. As crews gain experience together, communication often becomes shorter because much of the shared understanding already exists.

Much of this coordination occurs through anticipation rather than explicit instruction. Experienced crew members learn to recognise what others are likely to need next and prepare for it before being asked. The lowering rope is already in position, the next saw has been fuelled, the truck has been repositioned or the escape route has been cleared before anyone requests it. Arboricultural crews therefore function as more than collections of technically capable individuals. They develop a shared understanding of how each person works, allowing the crew to solve constantly changing problems collectively rather than relying on continual direction.

The interpersonal requirement extends beyond explicit instructions. Every jobsite contains tasks that are unpleasant, repetitive or easy to postpone, but leaving these activities too late can create bottlenecks or an unnecessary rush at the end of the job. An experienced leader may recognise that clean-up, dragging, awkward trimming or equipment preparation needs to begin earlier and communicate this simply by joining the work. In many crews, joining an unattractive task communicates its importance more effectively than directing it from a distance.

This helps explain why it can be difficult to lead a tree crew without being both capable of, and willing to contribute to, the physical work. Technical credibility, visible effort and fairness all influence whether instructions are accepted, particularly when the leader is asking others to undertake demanding or unpleasant tasks. More fundamentally, leaders establish legitimacy by demonstrating that they understand the practical constraints affecting everyone else because they are sharing them. This presents a challenge for many experienced arborists as they age. Although they often possess the greatest technical knowledge and judgement, they may become less able to perform the most physically demanding work. In these situations, the ability to contribute through planning, mentoring, communication and coordination becomes increasingly valuable.

Arborists must also communicate effectively with clients, neighbours, contractors, site managers and members of the public. They may need to explain why work must change, why an expected outcome is technically inappropriate or why additional time is required. A technically capable arborist can still produce a poor overall outcome if these relationships are managed poorly.

The interpersonal element is therefore not separate from technical performance. It is one of the mechanisms through which technical capability becomes productive organisational capability. Communication, anticipation, credibility and cooperation determine whether individual skill can be translated into safe, efficient and commercially successful work.

Why arborist capability is difficult to train

Arborist skills can be taught, but different types of knowledge require different forms of learning. Formal training can provide technical principles, structured practice, safety knowledge and assessment against defined standards. These foundations are essential, particularly where the consequences of poorly understood techniques are severe.

However, much of the judgement described above develops through supervised exposure to varied work. A developing arborist must encounter enough trees, sites, crews, operating problems and unexpected outcomes to begin recognising patterns. Someone with greater experience must be available to explain what mattered, correct misunderstandings and prevent the consequences of mistakes from becoming unacceptable.

The quality of development therefore depends heavily on the work system surrounding the trainee. It matters which jobs they encounter, which people they work beside, what they are allowed to attempt, how feedback is provided and whether experienced employees have sufficient time and incentive to teach them.

Two people can spend the same number of years in the industry and develop very different levels of capability. One may receive repeated exposure to varied, technically demanding work under strong supervision, while another completes a narrow range of tasks without being given the context or feedback needed to build independent judgement.

Training also creates an economic problem for employers because it consumes the attention of the same experienced arborists who are already scarce. A trainee may increase crew capacity in one situation but constrain it in another, particularly where their development requires a skilled person to stop producing, closely supervise the work or correct avoidable errors. Employers bear these costs well before the trainee can reliably operate independently.

The economics of developing arborists require separate treatment, but the central point is that an experienced arborist cannot be produced merely by increasing course enrolments. Formal education, suitable commercial exposure, effective crew organisation and employer investment must operate together.

The shortage begins before recruitment

Arborist skills are difficult to come by partly because the occupation makes advanced capability slow and uncertain to develop. The work is variable, important knowledge must remain at the point of action, individual techniques must be integrated into a changing job and performance depends on coordination across a crew. Clients and other stakeholders also form part of the operating environment, while much of the required judgement develops only through repeated exposure to real situations.

Recruitment, qualification numbers and training capacity still matter, but they form only part of the workforce system. Employers must also consider how new entrants become useful, who transfers knowledge to them, whether crews support development and how scarce experienced time is deployed. Once advanced capability has been created, the organisation must then provide working conditions, progression and rewards that give the person a credible reason to remain.

Before asking where more skilled arborists can be found, the industry should therefore ask a more fundamental question:

How effectively are we creating, transferring, using and retaining the knowledge that arboricultural work requires?