Career opportunities in nature conservation: HLF Heritage Training Bursary Placements
Herefordshire Nature Trust, alongside project partners Ambios Ltd (Devon) and Sheffield Wildlife Trust, are running one of ten exclusive national heritage partnership projects in the country to be awarded funding by the Heritage Lottery Fund to run a heritage work based training scheme.
The £947,000 scheme is designed to help tackle the shortages in heritage skills needed by professionals to conserve the natural heritage and biodiversity of England’s rural, urban and coastal areas. Typical skills viewed as being at risk include: species identification, wildlife habitat survey, habitat management and interpretation.
Project LEMUR offers a combination of on-the-job professional experience and formal training linked to a variety of work areas including species identification, wildlife habitat survey, habitat management, heritage interpretation and those all important generic work skills such as project management and computer skills.
» For more information, visit the LEMUR web site.
Training the next generation of field naturalists
The project will not only invest in the next generation of field naturalists but will also help meet demand within the heritage sector.
To achieve this goal, project LEMUR has brought together the Herefordshire Nature Trust, Sheffield Wildlife Trust and the Devonshire based not-for-profit social enterprise Ambios Ltd. Each will act as a ‘hub’ that will out-post four work-based bursary placements a year to heritage organisations in their respective geographical areas. The placements will repeat every 9 months over the 3½ years of the project.
The training and work experience on offer has either a marine, urban or rural theme, hence the projects title ‘LEMUR’ (Learning Environments in Marine, Urban and Rural areas). The heritage bursaries in Herefordshire will have a rural theme linked to woodlands, wildflower meadows, rivers, orchards and agriculture. The Sheffield bursaries will have an urban theme linked to habitats within urban wildlife corridors; whilst in Devon, bursaries will have a marine theme linked to coastal habitats such as estuarine sites, sea cliffs and dune systems.
Throughout the program, the bursary placements each receive a mixture of on the job experience and more formal training linked to habitat management, ecological survey, species identification and heritage interpretation; along with more generic work skills such as project management skills and computer skills. The project will foster an ethos of ‘learning through watching and practicing’. Throughout the project bursary placements will be able to share their experiences and network with fellow bursary placements and professionals within the sector.
Phil Burton, The Trusts Learning Manager said: “For a number of years now the Trust and its project partners have been creating opportunities that allow new graduate entrants to gain the skills necessary to break into the sector. This new funding is a national acknowledgement that the heritage sector now publicly recognises that there are skills gaps in the industry. This exciting new bursary scheme shows that the lead players are now working together to make sure that we get the people we need, in order to go on preserving our natural environment."
The LEMUR Project is essentially an extension of the award winning work delivered by the Environmental Experience for life-long Learning project (EEL) which delivered training opportunities to graduates. EEL will continue via its short course program of environmental skill workshops. These workshops, which provide fundamental skills in species identification and survey skills, will now be on offer to anybody with an interest in wildlife recording.
» For more information, visit the LEMUR web site.
» For more information about the Heritage Lottery Fund click here.
This project is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
