What Are The Highest Paying Jobs in Forestry?

Video Transcript

Host Question:
What would be the highest paying fields or maybe types of places to work at with an environmental degree?

Guest Answer:
Industrial sector is going to be your highest paid position. They pay out the most. Consulting is somehow both the lowest and somehow above the highest end. It just depends. If you work for an engineering firm and consulting, that’s probably going to be your highest paid. Even though engineers typically are consultants themselves. They tend to pay a lot higher wage. You can take the boards for that. They kind of pull on bigger contracts and bigger money, like your smaller environmental firms. It’s going to be the lowest end of the spectrum in the highest end, just depending on where you fit in.

Guest Answer:
So making sure that you have that page is key when you look at the industry as a whole. Most employees aren’t looking for a PhD or a master’s degree, and within that, you’re going to do a lot of research. They’re wanting to know the implementation and how to best conserve and how to reduce the forest carbon model and how to best help that. So making sure that you have the highest degree is very important.

Guest Answer:
Disregarding the federal government because depending on what grade level you get hired at, you’re pretty much capped at that until you move up another grade level. So regarding private industry, I would say the area where you’re going to probably get paid the most is probably environmental compliance type of things, where you are hired as a consultant or an outsider for a company that wants to make sure that they’re following NEPA or certain laws that have been put in place either by the government or by the state. I know California has a lot of environmental compliance laws. I know when you get into the law policy side of things, you’re oftentimes working for like non-profits or big institute that can be very high paying. But then again, you’re not really field going at that point. You’re pretty much the people making the decisions about what has to be followed. So I would say private consulting / environmental compliance, inspecting and the law and policy type of things is going to be highest paying as well as perhaps manufacturing the timber companies that not necessarily the ones that are like harvesting. But when you turn into what are you going to do with the products? Then the people that are working high up in those companies, obviously that can be very lucrative.

Guest Answer:
It would be in private industry, you know, whether in environmental consulting job or getting more specific into forestry or working as a Forester for a forestry consulting group, for a timber and/or real estate owner like warehouses are some great big timber producers or working at the forest or for a mill that buy timber sales from either private citizens or public timber sales like the Forest Service puts out, have their own foresters to size up the timber that’s available and see what’s worth bidding on and how much they’re going to bid on it.

Guest Answer:
So I would say the highest paying fields the ones that with better with like research related, the highest paying like employer would be possibly like if you worked for like a government agency, but there are like private companies that do environmental work that will pay you very low.