Registered Consulting Arborist! and why you should care...

Yeah, I'm so, like, an RCA now. What? Well, I just completed the Registered Consulting Arborist (RCA) requirements put together by the American Society of Consulting Arborists (ASCA) Never heard of it? You're not alone. It's an achievement, but it's hard to brag about without some explanation. Come on, let me tell you, it'll just take a minute....

An arborist is a tree specialist. A Certified Arborist has passed a 200-question exam on a wide range of topics including soils, tree biology, climbing and safety. It's the entry-level certification in our industry. If you want a tree pruned, removed or planted, a Certified Arborist is often your best bet.

A consulting arborist applies their knowledge and experience to complex tree issues including protecting trees during construction, assessing hazard trees and legal cases. We give advice, usually in writing. In addition to understanding trees, we have to be good technical writers. We have to be clear, concise, logical, interesting and knowledgable....sure, no problem.

I passed the Certified Arborist exam in 2000. Being a Certified Arborist doesn't give you all the skills necessary to be a consultant, so going through the RCA requirements helped a lot. Here's what I had to do:

1. Have a certain amount of education and experience to even apply in the first place.
   
2. Attend and graduate an intensive 3-4 day seminar called the Consulting Academy. Here we talk about report writing, consulting ethics, running a consulting business, etc. We also have to pass an exam and write 2 sample reports that are graded. A passing grade for the reports is a 75.
   
3. After graduating the Academy, you could stop there. Many consultants do. But if you want to go on to become an RCA, you have to write 2 more reports for grading.

This whole process took me about 2 years after graduating the Academy. Some people take less time. Some people never get around to it. There's no time limit, therefore no deadline to finish the additional reports.

Why did I do it? I write a lot of arborist reports at work and wanted to take advantage of the learning opportunity. A course in technical writing could have been helpful, but I wouldn't have learned as much about the consulting business that way.

 Many of my arborist colleagues say things like, "When I get too old to do all this physical work, I want to be a consultant." But you can't make the switch that easily. Climbing, pruning and running a tree service business don't prepare you for writing technical reports and all the paperwork that consultants have to deal with. So if you want to be a consultant, start learning while you're still young. Go to the Consulting Academy. If you have the opportunity to work for an experienced consultant, do so.

And if you are hiring an arborist, be aware what kind of an arborist you need to hire. Ask them about their qualifications. Many situations requiring an arborist report specify that it must be written by a Certified Arborist. But an RCA or a Consulting Academy graduate is more likely to produce a well-written, easy-to-read report with high-quality information. On the other hand, the RCA program didn't teach me anything about taking out that big dead oak tree in your yard,

Well, thanks for celebrating with me. One day everyone will know what an RCA is. I guess it's up to us RCAs to raise our own profile. Maybe you can help...