How to Build a Career Working in the Great Outdoors

Last Updated on January 2, 2025

Many people are seeking ways to earn a stable income without being confined to a desk for eight hours a day. The thought of staring at a screen, enduring uncomfortable office chairs, and navigating complex office dynamics is unappealing for those who value a more active and engaging work environment. If you are one of these individuals, rest assured that there are plenty of outdoor jobs offering lucrative pay and fulfilling experiences.

Opportunities abound for those who want to trade the monotony of an office for the fresh air and excitement of outdoor work. From conservation roles to creative design opportunities in landscaping, the options cater to a wide range of interests and skill sets. These roles allow you to combine your passion for the outdoors with a rewarding career. Explore some of the best-paying outdoor jobs and discover how they can align with your skills, ambitions, and lifestyle. One of them might just be the perfect fit for you.

What This Article Covers

• Explore outdoor career opportunities that offer great pay and a break from traditional desk jobs.
• Learn what a Range Manager does, including their role in protecting natural landscapes and working with ranchers and farmers.
• Discover the career path of a Professional Geographer and the various niches within geography, from physical to cultural studies.
• Understand the responsibilities of Landscape Architects, including designing and restoring outdoor spaces and creating environmentally innovative structures.
• Find out the education requirements and skills needed to succeed in outdoor careers like Range Management and Landscape Architecture.
• Learn about the salary potential for outdoor jobs, such as the $64,000 average for Range Managers and $75,000 for Geographers.
• See how outdoor careers can offer hybrid work environments, combining office tasks with hands-on fieldwork.
• Get inspired by the diverse opportunities available in outdoor professions that allow you to connect with nature while earning a solid income.

A Range Manager

Okay, you may not have heard of a Range Manager before because they are often referred to as Range Conservationists, which is a much more environmentally friendly title. To try and give you the briefest of overviews, a range conservationist is a scientist who specializes in the protection of natural landscapes, you know, things like grasslands, wetlands, and forests.

The way they protect these places is by working with local ranchers and farmers to develop the best systems of operation possible. This could be rotating the grazing areas, maintaining soil levels through the use of herbicides, or ensuring the ground is ideal for revegetation each year. They will also come up with strategies to protect local wildlife from things like wildfire and predators and poachers and all that sort of naughty stuff.

So, yeah, everything that is required on this front is part and parcel of the Range Manager’s role, and for it, they tend to get paid an average salary of $64,000. They also need to get their hands on some seriously tough footwear, that’s a fact, which is why we recommend you try them from Steel Blue and just make sure you can hack a life of hiking boots and march about harsh landscapes. If you can, though, and this is all something that interests you, intrigues you, and completely grabs you by the soul and shakes you into submission, then a great place to start is with a degree – or qualification – in forestry or agriculture and then go from there.

A Professional Geographer

This will be great news for anyone who studied Geography at college and had to put up with those incessant jokes about how they studied coloring and sticking for three years. It also means that there is a direct profession that you can go into after you get your degree (take that careers advisor). But what does a geographer do?

Let’s start with physical geographers (yup, there is more than one type of geographer), who study a specific location. What they study depends on their niche, but it typically falls under things like climate, weather, soil, water, or landforms. If none of this interests you too much, don’t despair, physical geographers can also study things like animals and plants and rocks and minerals.

Of course, this may not take your fancy either (why are you studying Geography again) in which case, why not take a look at what medical geographers and cultural geographers do? To give you a quick brief, the former studies diseases in certain areas, and the latter studies the relationship between the different cultural variables. That’s right up our street.

So, what do you get in exchange for a life as a geographer? Well, if you have successfully got a degree, then you could be working toward a nice little paycheck of $75,000 and you get to travel. Now that is a cool benefits package.

A Landscape Gardener

I just broke one of the cardinal sins of landscaping; I called them gardeners and not architects, which they most definitely are. The great thing about this is that there is loads of scope to explore when it comes to this career option. There are private gardens, parks, playgrounds, stately homes, urban spaces, schools, campuses, hotels, residential spots, and just about anything else that has outdoor space that needs designing.

When it comes to actual designing, landscape architects have to come up with everything that could possibly need addressing. This could be what tiles a swimming pool uses, where the road goes and what the road is made out of, what trees go where, and what outbuildings would add to the whole look and feel. But this isn’t all they do. No.

As a landscape architect, you could go down the challenging route of restoring historical sites, and rebuilding damaged wetlands and streams that have been plugged by human destruction, whether deliberate or not. The big trend at the moment, though, is using their skills and talents to develop environmentally innovative structures. This is becoming the must-do thing in most major cities now, where rooftop gardens want to better harness their ability to capture water from storms and then use it efficiently or develop vertical gardens that can cling to the walls and thus allow bees to be able to pollinate more and pollinate better. All of these things can fall under the bell curve that is a landscape architect’s responsibility.

Of course, there is one thing we should mention, and that is the fact most landscape architects work out of an office of some kind. We’re saying this like it is a negative thing, but it could be that you are looking for a hybrid career that offers you the best of both worlds; the chance to work out of an office space while still being able to escape into the outside world, and be among nature and know how to better work with it. Don’t fret just yet because you will be able to spend a considerable amount of your time in the field, working out exactly what goes where in reality and not just on paper.

So, how do you get to be a landscape architect and what does it pay? Well, first things first, you need to get at least a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture or have minored in it alongside your architecture studies. It is, however, possible to work your way up the ranks from an intern role, it just requires grit and determination. This effort will be paid handsomely, though, probably to the tune of around $70,000 and upward.

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