Well who’d have thought in July 1994 that the Countryside Jobs Service would still be here thirty years later, never mind that it would have become the all encompassing countryside information service it is today?
For it was in July 1994 that those first small envelopes started landing on the doormats of countryside rangers, inside were a couple of sheets of closely typed A4 containing details of vacancies in the countryside management sector.
We talked about conservation but always had to prefix it with nature because in 1994 conservation was mainly for historic buildings. The National Trust had wardens not rangers which meant we sometimes got enquiries about prison wardens! In 1996, the first year for which we have the data, we published 202 jobs for rangers and wardens, by 2023 that had risen to 1400 adverts (not vacancies) more than the total number of vacancies in 1996 (1008). Which just shows how much things have changed. Not only that but large as that number is it was only 17% of all the adverts we published, the range covered by CJS has also changed dramatically.
The rise in technology brought about massive changes.
No longer do we need to wade though a small forest of newspapers to find the job adverts, nor do we wait with crossed fingers that the postman arrives on time with a board-backed envelope containing the artwork “bromide” from a London ad agency to be literally cut and pasted (edges masked with magic tape) to create the master copy of that week’s edition of CJS in good time so that we don’t need to stay up all night keeping the printers going. Can you believe that CJS is older than Google? (established September 1998) For anyone with a long memory our first email address was ranger@onyxnet.co.uk, because people simply didn’t have their own websites, ours came along at the turn of the millennium and the email address we use today ranger@countryside-jobs.com was launched in July 2003. And talking of websites, we’d hoped to have our shiny new one by now but as our new web developers have found, countyside-jobs.com is massive. They keep asking us, “do you know how much content you have here?”; “yes”, we reply “we know, we wrote and uploaded all of it,” and behind the scenes to keep it all running smoothly it’s exceptionally complicated as well.
It wasn’t until November 2021 that we finally relinquished the print edition of CJS Weekly and went fully digital. And that’s allowed us to expand how much information we can include, pixels are more forgiving than paper and now each edition has several feature articles, lots of information, all the news – you get the idea. Also as it’s completely online now we were able to reintroduce the unique CJS Digest.
There have been many other momentous changes over the years.
I created the, now trademarked, logo which was introduced in July 2002, hand drawn initially and then using the height of technology at the time traced over using MSpaint and wordart (eek, I’m almost ashamed to admit it now!). For many years we had a stencil of the original hand drawn logo painted over the office door. In December 2004 we left the small office in Sleights and moved to the larger office suite in Goathland – which is now usually empty with the team preferring to work from home since the pandemic. Eighteen months after moving Niall retired and Kerryn took over the editorship of the CJS and I’m still here!
The sector has seen many changes too, many of them, like CJS, have been a gradual evolution.
Volunteers have always been a vital part of the conservation workforce but were mostly managed on an ad hoc basis by existing staff, dedicated volunteer co-ordinators and managers are a newer introduction. A process speeded up by the introduction of the government’s New Deal in 1998, a workfare programme providing training, subsidised employment and voluntary work for the unemployed and brought with it the need for staff to manage this burgeoning cohort of volunteers and trainees some of whom had never set foot outside of a city park. CJS published the first adverts for New Deal Project Officers in February 1998 and by the end of the year had included 70 vacancies. Most organisations now have a member of staff with responsibility for recruiting, looking after and leading keen volunteer teams.
Support staff are vital to keeping everything running smoothly and again this is an area which has grown with the sector, from a single secretary dealing with bookings and typing up minutes and letters when I first started at the National Park in 1996 to whole teams with some very specialised duties being recruited. In 2023 a Practice Manager was required to run the administration of an ecological consultancy, the recruit needed to have significant accountancy experience. There are also roles dedicated to sourcing funding and to managing social media, something which simply did not exist in 1994.
There are a few areas where things have not changed so much.
Rights of Way and Access roles experienced a brief increase in response to the introduction of the CROW Act in 2000 as Definitive Maps were drawn up and finalised, however the introduction of technology such as GIS and GPS maps has in many ways made this specialist area less necessary for councils and agencies and numbers of jobs have plateaued. Woodland management and arboriculture are growth fields as we become more aware of the importance of tree planting in our goal of reaching net zero – another term that would have been alien in the early days of CJS when we were talking about the Greenhouse Effect and worrying about ozone holes. However, being ahead of the curve CJS has always been environmentally conscious using only 100% recycled paper from the very first edition.
New areas have come along and burgeoned, the ecology and biodiversity sector, for example, which now forms the second largest group of vacancies with 957 adverts in 2023 (12% of all advertised online), however it wasn’t until 2010 that there were sufficient posts to warrant a separate category in the, what had become annual, Review with 155 vacancies comprising 6% of the total advertised that year. Something that was never even thought of 30 years ago was Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, this is a recent addition to subjects up for discussion, and we’ve carried a few articles about it and it is something that is beginning to be mentioned in job descriptions.
Volunteering is not possible for everyone.
One very welcome change is the gradual awareness that volunteering is not sustainable for many people and we’re seeing many more paid traineeships and intern posts. These are really helping to grow the workforce and allowing our young people (and career changers too) to gain the all important experience and practical skills that are needed for a long, successful career in the sector and for too long were a missing element, one that many will know has frequently been a topic of discussion!
Slow and steady growth.
And through it all CJS paddles along, the Team doing our best to keep the sector informed and updated through various upheavals and crises, from the devastation wrought by the Foot and Mouth outbreak in 2001 to the world changing covid 19 pandemic.
As you can see CJS’s growth has not only been in the range of jobs and careers but a widening in the content too. The website and newsletters now carry a wide variety of information, articles and in depth features aimed at the profession and giving a behind the scenes look at what life’s really like working in the sector, a full directory of training (long and short courses) and a daily news service – things that 30 years ago would never have fitted in those first little envelopes.
Our Silver Anniversary.
When we celebrated our 25th Birthday in 2019 many friends and partners wrote lovely things about CJS, you can read these here.
If you have any memories of CJS, Niall and Anthea or the Team we'd love to hear them, please email us.