There were how many adverts?
As January draws to a close it's time to take stock of last year and look at the jobs we advertised, the newsletters we sent out, the features we published - and there are a lot!
The recruitment landscape changed in autumn 2024 and the volatility carried through into 2025 before settling at a generally lower level in the summer. This is reflected in the 17% decrease in adverts placed during 2025 down from 2699 in 2024 to 2236 in 2025.
Two thirds of the adverts, 1525 of the total, were posted to the website the remainder appear in CJS Weekly including over 600 in the unique CJS Digest. A small but significant increase in the percentage of advertisers opting for the free advert as budgets get squeezed. Another reminder why readers may be missing out if they don't get a copy of CJS Weekly, there are lots of free subs options available if 50p a week seems one expense too many.
Ah, but what sort of jobs?
Of the adverts posted online the majority were for countryside management roles (19%) however 10% were working in ecology and a further 7% for community and volunteer co-ordinator type roles. There was a good spread across all the other areas covered by CJS with combined forestry and arboriculture roles comprising 8% of total. Nearly three quarters of roles were at the main grade level but we were surprised that only 41% of roles specified a full time contract.
Traineeships were among the most popular adverts on the website in 2025, taking four of the top ten advert places, all of them attracting over 1,000 views during the period they were online. The most popular advert was for the graduate development programme with Scottish Forestry. Interestingly five of the top ten were for jobs in Scotland with National Trust for Scotland, Scottish Wildlife Trust and Balmoral estate. Only three posts were for rangers, four were forestry focused and two wildlife protection roles.
You can see the data tables here for jobs and here for regional distribution.
And most of it is done free!
By keeping details of last year's workloads and details on exactly we published we can also see how much we’ve done free – and when we look at the numbers it appears that it is the majority of all that CJS does!
So what exactly did we do?
Well, of the nearly forty thousand CJS Weeklys nine in ten of those were sent free (89.6% to be precise). There were 140 free linage adverts for paid posts (in CJS Weekly) and 504 for voluntary / unpaid roles these were online as well as in CJS Weekly, a substantial increase from the 364 in 2025, another reflection of the change in the countryside workforce. And of course the unique CJS Digest of vacancies from other sources which ran to 665 listings over the year, another one only accessible by CJS Weekly subscribers.
That’s not all, we published 115 in depth features and articles. The Training Directory carried over 2,000 listings for short and long courses. We also promote a wide range of initiatives funding opportunities, events, surveys, research and citizens science – pretty much anything within the countryside conservation sector.
Why do we do this?
CJS continues to evolve to meet changing demands, however, one thing that remains constant is that CJS is a Service, that word is not there by accident. When it was launched the aim of the Countryside Jobs Service was just that, to provide a service. Since the first edition CJS has always been focused on promoting countryside careers in the UK and environmental conservation worldwide and not on making vast profits thereby ensuring that hard earned funds are spent where they should be – on actually conserving things and not on advertising. However, we do need to earn enough to pay the bills and allow us to do all of this free of charge so whilst you can advertise on other websites you won’t be helping out in quite same way – or gaining access to the dedicated professionals across the sector reading this vast trove of information.