College of DuPage, a community college in Glen Ellyn, Ill., is launching a new Landscape Contracting and Management degree that will prepare graduates to design, implement and maintain landscape projects in horticulture-related careers, Yahoo! Finance reported.
The program, which is accredited by the National Association of Landscape Professionals, will teach students to design and construct landscapes, estimate and bid projects, understand plant health care and manage ground maintenance, according to the report.
“College of DuPage is only one of 30 colleges and universities in the country accredited by the National Association of Landscape Professionals,” Brian Clement, an instructor in the Horticulture program, told Yahoo!. “The NALP accreditation team wanted the college to have a specific landscape degree, so we started with our current courses, added new ones and then spelled out all of the requirements as identified by NALP accreditation standards.”
The program, which was recently approved by the Illinois Community College Board and is now accepting applications, requires 71 credit hours and 225 internship hours. The program’s three main courses, which are created specifically for the new degree, are “OSHA 10-hour landscape safety,” “Irrigation and water management” and “Landscape Bidding and Estimating.”
The program will be designed to prepare students to enter the workforce directly out of school with jobs as landscape designers, grounds maintenance managers, landscape sales and marketing supervisors, golf course maintenance supervisors or entrepreneurs.
Glen Ellyn is about 40 minutes from Chicago, which has a higher employment level of landscaping and grounds workers than any other metropolitan area in the U.S., according to Department of Labor statistics cited in the report. This makes DuPage’s program highly attractive, Clement told Yahoo!.
“The need is definitely there,” he said. “In DuPage County alone, the job market just for grounds maintenance workers is projected to grow more than 13 percent during the next eight years and more than 18 percent nationally. The Landscape Contracting and Management degree is perfectly designed to meet this growing demand for skilled employees.”
Read the full report at Yahoo! Finance. To learn more about the Landscape Contracting and Management degree, visit College of Dupage’s website or email clement@cod.edu.
