Ecologist careers guide

Getting into ecology careers

So what is the REAL relationship between plants, animals and our environment? Ecologists get to study the links between the environment and all living things. Ecologists can be research scientists, teachers or work for places like environmental organisations or zoos. A science degree will often place you in a great position to explore lots of options in an ecology career path.

Ecologists are specialists in their field!

Ecologists can work in all kinds of places – in labs, offices, the great outdoors and even underwater. If you’re interested in life sciences you could look at how to conserve fish populations for generations to come, or even how to help hedgehogs cross motorways with special hedgehog tunnels. You can even become a Bat Ecologist who specialises in making sure bats aren’t harmed by human activity. But to do this you’ll need an official Bat Licence!

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Useful Skills To Put On Your CV:

• Self-belief skills – self-belief isn’t just confidence but perseverance. You’ll be presented with environmental challenges where you may have to try several approaches to find one that works best for biodiversity.
• Good communication skills and teamworking skills – you’ll usually be working as part of a team, and sharing your findings with an organisation or client.
• Good problem solving skills – a creative approach to problems is often needed in ecology work. You need plenty of imagination, because your work could even take you to the stars! If you were asked to decide how plants should be grown by people of the future living in deep space, how would YOU do it?
• Good organisation skills – ecology often means doing field work in the great outdoors, but there’s a lot of paperwork involved too. You could be analysing data or making reports on your discoveries and recommendations for environmentally sustainable action.
• Self-management skills – you’ll usually receive training from your employer, but it’s up to you to have a keen interest in ecology and the passion to top up your skills and knowledge.

Top Skills-Boosting Tip

Combine your love of nature and life on Earth with an eye for data and detail – and maybe even a business head! Sometimes you need a bit of determination (and cold hard accurate facts that businesses can’t ignore) to achieve the desired results.

How Do You Get These Skills?

Vocational qualifications and work experience will help you build these skills over time.

Build Your Skills With the FREE Young Professional Programme

School, college and training

It can seem like it might take forever to become an ecologist. Although some ecology jobs want you to have studied for years to get a Ph.D, not all of them do. You need to be dedicated to learning more about living things and the environment, so it will often help you to study for a science degree.

Some ecologists need to know about economics, social sciences and engineering – it really depends on what kind of ecology work you want to do.

Whichever type of ecology you specialise in, it will be useful to have at least five GCSEs (or the equivalent) with passing grades of 9-4 (A to C) including English, maths, at least one science, and possibly geography.

You will also benefit from having at least two A-levels with good passing grades. These will help you get into a junior job where you can build skills and knowledge with training, or apply for a degree. You could also apply for a relevant apprenticeship.

Ecology Apprenticeships

An alternative route is to take your first step into an ecology career with an environmental conservation apprenticeship. You’ll get to build your awareness and enjoy the environment while earning a salary and training up in rural and/or urban conservation.

University degrees and graduates

A lot of ecologists have degrees. Some useful degrees to study for include:

• Ecology
• Conservation biology
• Environmental sustainability
• Environmental science
• Ecological science
• Marine biology
• Zoology

Getting Chartered Status

Once you’ve become an ecologist you could get chartered status to become a Chartered Environmentalist (CEnv) or Chartered Ecologist (CEcol). This will help you earn more money, take on more responsibility, and work on even more sophisticated projects.

You’re a Chartered Ecologist. What next?

Once you have chartered status you could become a senior ecologist. Your work could include leading research teams, creating new plans for biodiversity, or consulting on sustainable development projects so that human progress doesn’t have a bad impact on the environment.

Work Experience Tips

It can help your application if you have previously done work experience or volunteering in an conservation environment.

Examples of relevant work experience include:

• Work shadowing (even if it’s just for a day)
• Work placements in a company
• Industry placements on a degree course

Work experience tips

Volunteering Tips

There are lots of opportunities for ecology volunteering across the UK. Visit these organisations to find out more:

• The Conservation Volunteers
• National Trust
• Wildlife Trusts

Volunteering tips

Where could you work?

As an ecologist, you are looking at ecosystems of organisms in their environment – how healthy and abundant they are. That means you’ll be spending time outdoors as well as indoors.

When you’re just starting out on your career path, you’ll do outdoors work like carrying out surveys to monitor species and the environment they live in. Once you get more experience and responsibility, you might end up getting involved in management other members of the team (still outside) or looking at policy and conservation rules (this work is more indoors).

Example daily job responsibilities

• Doing fieldwork to study and record information on plants, animals, biodiversity and living conditions in a rural or urban environment
• Researching ways in which human activity (like housing or intensive farming) affects the environment
• Building computer models using Computer Aided Design (CAD) to predict the effects of rising pollution, climate change or land development
• Managing conservation areas like woodland, meadows and lakes
• Making recommendations to local or government authorities on the best way to use land in an environmentally safe way.

To find jobs for young people in this role, search on jobs boards for early career roles with these words in the title:

• Environmental conservation apprentice
• Ecology apprentice
• Assistant ecologist
• Graduate ecologist
• Seasonal ecologist (for undergraduate work placements or post graduate studies)

These websites might be able to help you find ecology experience or a role that’s a good fit for you:

• Find an Apprenticeship
• The Conservation Volunteers
• National Trust
• Wildlife Trust
• Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM)
• British Ecological Society

These employers all carry our Youth Friendly Employer Mark. We work with them to make sure that they are providing great support and opportunities to young people.

Click on an employer to find out more about them and the youth-friendly opportunities they offer, from work experience and apprenticeships through to graduate schemes.