If you work in garden retail, you’ll probably know exactly what I mean when I say that good horticulturists are becoming increasingly difficult to find.
Plant Area Managers, Plant Supervisors, horticultural experts, buyers - whatever the job title might be, finding someone with strong plant knowledge who also understands the commercial side of a garden centre is becoming one of the biggest recruitment challenges I come across.
And the question I keep coming back to is: where is the next generation of horticulturists coming from?
The perfect candidate is getting harder to find
When I speak to garden centres about a plant area vacancy, the brief is often understandably ambitious.
They want someone with excellent horticultural knowledge, strong customer service skills, commercial awareness, buying experience, good merchandising standards and the ability to manage and develop a team.
Ideally, they’ll have an RHS qualification too.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting all of that. The problem is that there simply aren't enough people coming through with the complete package.
We have a generation of incredibly knowledgeable horticulturists across the industry, many of whom have spent 20, 30 or even 40 years building that knowledge.
But are we developing enough people underneath them?
I'm not sure we are.
Plant knowledge takes time
One of the challenges horticulture faces compared with many other areas of retail is that genuine product knowledge can't be learnt overnight.
You can teach someone how to read a sales report.
You can develop their management skills.
You can teach them about margin, stock turn, labour budgets and KPIs.
But knowing plants is different.
Understanding what will thrive in a customer's north-facing garden, recognising a disease, knowing when something should be pruned or being able to suggest an alternative when a particular variety isn't available comes from a combination of education and experience.
That's exactly what makes knowledgeable garden centre employees so valuable.
It's also what makes replacing them so difficult.
Are we looking for finished products?
This is perhaps where the industry needs to challenge itself.
I regularly speak with candidates who have 70% or 80% of what a garden centre is looking for.
They might have fantastic plant knowledge but haven't managed a large team.
They might be brilliant retailers with a genuine passion for horticulture but haven't completed an RHS qualification.
Or perhaps they've spent three years working underneath an experienced Plant Area Manager but haven't been given the opportunity to take responsibility for buying.
Too often, we're looking for someone who has already done the exact job somewhere else.
That works while there is a healthy pool of experienced people to recruit from.
But what happens when everyone is trying to recruit from the same increasingly small group?
We need to give people a route upwards
Some of the best conversations I have are with people who didn't necessarily start their careers expecting to work in horticulture.
They took a weekend job at a garden centre, discovered they loved plants and gradually built a career.
Others have come from landscaping, nurseries, DIY retailers or completely different areas of retail and developed their horticultural knowledge along the way.
Those routes into the industry still exist, but the important part is what happens next.
If someone joins as a Garden Centre Assistant with an interest in plants, can they see a route to becoming a Plant Supervisor?
Can the Plant Supervisor see how they could become a Plant Area Manager?
And can the Plant Area Manager eventually see themselves becoming an Assistant Manager or Garden Centre Manager?
If people can't see that progression, there is always the risk that they'll look elsewhere.
Employers may need to hire for potential
I'm not suggesting garden centres should lower their standards.
Plant knowledge is incredibly important, particularly when knowledgeable advice is one of the things that differentiates a good garden centre from other retailers.
But there is a difference between lowering standards and giving someone the opportunity to develop.
Instead of asking whether someone can already do 100% of the job, perhaps we should be asking whether they could do it with the right support six or twelve months from now.
That might mean investing in RHS qualifications.
It might mean allowing a supervisor to shadow the buying process.
It could mean giving someone responsibility for a category before handing them an entire plant area.
Or it might mean considering someone from outside traditional garden retail who has the commercial and leadership skills but needs support developing their horticultural knowledge.
Otherwise, the problem only gets bigger
The experienced horticulturists working in garden centres today didn't suddenly appear with ten years' experience.
Somebody trained them.
Somebody gave them their first opportunity.
Somebody allowed them to make decisions, learn from mistakes and gradually take on more responsibility.
If the industry wants experienced Plant Area Managers in five or ten years' time, it needs to be developing them today.
Because if every garden centre wants to recruit an experienced horticulturist, but nobody is prepared to create one, we're eventually going to run out of people to recruit.
And from what I'm seeing in the market already, that isn't a problem for the future.
