Ben Crisford MICFor

Around the time I was leaving school, I had a realisation that I’d like to do a job that was a bit different and allowed me to spend lots of time outdoors. I knew nothing about forestry at the time, but it struck me that the infrastructure in my local forest must be maintained by someone, and I thought, “that’s something I could do”. I looked into careers in forestry, decided to give it a go, and found the job which gave me my start.

My first job was working in a coppice woodland in East Sussex, which I did for a year before starting my degree at the National School of Forestry (University of Cumbria).

Next, I successfully applied to the Tilhill Forestry graduate programme and learned the ropes as a forest manager in Southern Scotland.

I specialised early into GIS and remote sensing and ended up making an unconventional career move into a tech company, working on forestry remote sensing projects internationally for two years. I now work as a self-employed consultant.

My consultancy specialises in project work with a forest inventory, GIS and/or remote sensing focus, but I also take on forest planning work and provide training in GIS and remote sensing.

The best thing about being self-employed is getting to shape your own role and seek out a portfolio of work which you’re interested in and excited about, and it has worked out well for me. The challenge is building that portfolio and making sure you can pay the bills without the security of a salary payment each month!

Climate change (and all the risks and unknowns surrounding it) is surely one of the biggest, most obvious challenges we face. Another challenge is public perception; we need to get better at raising awareness of what we do and why we do it.

All of the challenges we face provide opportunities. We’ve got lots of problems to solve, and we need people to solve them.

As we increase woodland cover in the UK, I think there is an opportunity to build much better ‘name recognition’ of forestry in the UK and get to a point where the general public values the contribution of the sector much more widely than it does now.

The development of technologies can also be exciting. If we can do more with less and manage our forests at a more granular scale, that could have huge economic, social, and environmental advantages.

The honest answer is, when I worked for a forest management company, it was an easy decision, because they paid the subscription for me! I probably didn’t give it that much thought at the time.

Since then, it’s been a more deliberate decision. I self-funded my PME in 2022, and continue to be a fully paid-up member, for a few reasons. One of the main ones is I see the value in having a recognised professional qualification, and being part of a diverse network of professionals is hugely helpful.

ICF events are a great way of keeping up your CPD, and there is good diversity of these. Online events are a convenient way of giving up an hour to refresh your knowledge and learn something new, and the in-person events provide excellent networking opportunities.

Going through PME is a big piece of work and it was a significant milestone in my career. I feel proud to have achieved the MICFor post-nominals.

When working on projects overseas, I have found it helpful having a qualification that marks me out as a professional forester with real-world, lived experience beyond academic qualifications. Anyone can call themselves a forester, but chartership gives a level of credibility and parity with equivalent qualifications in other countries.

I think this is important for so many reasons. There are a lot of examples in forestry of where we are a bit stuck in our ways as an industry, and I think this is one area where diversity really helps. People with different skills and backgrounds look at problems differently, and I think that’s something we could do with more of.

More generally, forestry is an inherently diverse discipline. There are all sorts of roles available, and they require people with all sorts of skills and backgrounds to fill them.