Jobs For People Who Crush On The Outdoors

Get out! For real. Leave artificial lighting and stale building air behind. Let office-bound colleagues turn pasty and soft indoors while you explore outdoor jobs.

You’re meant to earn a living outside. Communing with nature. Hugging trees (consensually). Soaking up sun or snow instead of longingly looking out windows.

Entire careers – not just seasonal gigs – are all over for those who hate to be cooped up. If year-round work in the great wide open gets you lit, go exterior.

Agronomist
Used to be called crop analyst. Collecting fists full of soil and pronouncing on plants. Now it’s “precision decision agriculturalist,” please.

Still relies on field-centric data. So there’ll be plenty of trudging the back 40. But now there’s state-of-art processing gear and advanced agronomic analytics for best yields.

Arborist
Tree service technicians and arborists save our saplings, shrubs too. They diagnose growth problems and diseases (is fungus among us?). Applying treatments such as pruning, spraying, and injections. A background in horticulture or arboriculture’s good. Also, check out Forestry and Conservation work.

Construction labourer
Slide on the steel-toed boots and hoist that tool belt. There’s hammering and excavating to do for this popular outdoor job. Helping lay concrete. Drilling holes and schlepping heavy equipment. Not exactly a day at the spa. Can pay the bills though.

Environmental scientist
You cried crocodile tears when America ditched the Paris Agreement. There’s an Al Gore poster on the ceiling above your bed.

Jobs in this field protect the planet from our idiot selves. Outside testing the air, water and soil. Conquering commercial waste by reducing, reusing and recycling. Lab work and prepping policymakers are all in a day’s slog.

Mobile truck mechanic
When a tanker breaks down on the highway, it’s a traffic cork and costs the shipper a ton. That’s when they screech for roadside service. Takes a skilled mechanic, and no small bit of guts, to spot and fix messes fast while cars whiz by.

Package delivery driver
How’s your lower back? This job will make you trot, lift, bend and climb in and out of a van. Carrying packages up to 35 kg on your own. Driving against deadlines. Must have a commercial class licence.

Survey technician
Every day’s a Waze for you. Standing outside measuring distances, angles and contours. Doing the topographical thing. Making field notes, drawings, images and digital photos. Have to know OSP and GPS principals to apply ASAP.

Wind or pipeline technician
Modern wind turbines aren’t quaint windmills of olden. They’re massive structures piercing the sky. Needing green calibration and mechanical skills while the elements rage.

Pipelines need repairs too. Oozed oil or gas gives those Environmental Scientists apoplexy. Someone has to gauge tanks, witness sampling and monitor flow rates. Maybe even patch a puncture or two as part of this outdoor job.