I didn't know you did that!

What sort of jobs do you think Countryside Jobs Service advertises?

Countryside Rangers, of course; Countryside Officers, Rights of Way and arboricultural posts,  yes, those too.  But what about Volunteers Co-ordinators or Ecologists, did you know you'll find those too?  CJS actually advertises a lot more that you first think.

Every year we collate basic details of the adverts we've published; mostly for use in the office and some for inclusion in our information to readers and advertisers. Last year's numbers show that we advertised for more ranger type jobs than anything else, no surprise there! However the next two biggest categories were for jobs in arboriculture and ecology closely followed by trainee / apprenticeships with more than 250 posts in each group and over 200 working in environmental education. In our 2013 subscribers survey you asked for more horticulture jobs and to include outdoor activities instructors and working with animals and wildlife (zoos and similar) so we started including those making these the biggest 'growers' in terms of numbers of vacancies as we started sourcing more of these types of roles.  5.6% of our advertised vacancies were for horticultural jobs, 3.1% for outdoor activities and 2.6% for wildlife work, what's particularly pleasing for us is that you've obviously been applying for these and impressing the employers because now nearly half of the animal work jobs come direct to CJS and over a quarter of the outdoor activities and horticulture roles.  Which will please you too because it will mean that we get more of these sorts of adverts.

You can see the range of vacancies and the number of roles advertised in a nice neat table here.  And it's probably a greater range than you originally thought.

As it turns out it's more than some of advertisers thought too!.

One of our regular advertisers phoned to ask if we'd consider advertising an Environmental Education officer post and was quite surprise when we said that they account for over 6% of our total adverts.  It's the regular advertisers that sometimes lose sight of the width of CJS, we've made a note that we must include more details in our next advertisers information pack and when it's published make sure that every advertiser receives a copy - whether they read it or not is another matter!

This graph shows the number of roles advertised and the proportion of each group sent direct to CJS.

Despite our advertisers slight confusion over 60% of all adverts are sent direct to CJS, the remainder are sourced from national press, specialist publications and from over a 1000 individual company and council websites checked twice weekly, it's a mammoth task.
As you'd expect our best known areas have the higher proportion of direct adverts, 81% of roles for rangers came direct to CJS, 70% of rights of way vacancies and 65% Countryside Officer type posts. What's maybe surprising is that we also have high proportions of direct adverts for ecologists, researchers (mostly field workers), community involvement project work and environmental education officers.

As we continue to analyse the data from last year there will be more reports to follow, on geographical distribution and types of contracts offered.

NB: Data is across the whole of CJS not just online adverts. To gain access to all of these vacancies you need to subscribe to CJS Weekly, more information on that here.