How Seed Your Future’s New Horticulture Career Tool Will Continue to Grow
February 1, 2019 
Recently, Greenhouse Grower reported on Seed Your Future’s new free online horticulture career exploration resource. The site is designed to serve as a digital hub for all horticulture-career information in a concise, easy-to-read format with links to external resources, places to study and find scholarships, and videos of real people in each of the careers fields.
Since then, we caught up with Susan Yoder, Executive Director of Seed Your Future, to get more insights on where they plan to take this resource in the future.
Greenhouse Grower (GG): Are you soliciting videos from industry members to populate each career page, and if so, how would this process happen?
Susan Yoder: We started this process with Seed Your Future partner organizations to solicit videos for the launch, but well likely be looking for more videos at some point. We always want to keep them fresh. There are probably a lot of videos already made out there, but new ones are great as well.
GG: How are you promoting this resource beyond individuals who are already in this industry?
Yoder: We have a very robust plan of promotion. Along with press releases and social media, we will also promote it through Bloom, our youth-focused channel. We see this is a great way to reach beyond the industry, and that’s why we have questions at top of the career page that ask what you’re interested in first, rather than just showing a list a list of careers. Our hope is to reach those audiences through this approach.
GG: Will companies in the industry have the ability to post their own job listings?
Yoder: We don’t have this feature yet. We’ll consider in the future, but it has not been a top priority yet.
GG: How does this new resource fit into Seed Your Future’s mission?
Yoder: It goes back to our research that identified a lack of central, easily accessible information about careers in horticulture. Our mission is so focused on education that when we talked with parents, they all expressed a need for something online with reputable information. We’ve made it a top priority.
GG: What are the next steps or plans for this resource?
Yoder: First, we will expand the selection of questions at the top so it’s more interactive. There are eight categories now, but we want it to be more robust. We plan to talk more with parents and kids as we roll this out to help us shape it.
Second, later in 2019, we hope to relaunch of the Where to Study tool of programs. Our plan is to make it more robust and include certification programs and apprenticeships, which don’t require a two- or four-year degree. This will help make it a more complete site, and we’re really excited about that.
GG: Anything else we should mention?
Yoder: One thing that has come through is that people are excited about us expanding the list of careers. The site now has 103 careers listed, and people are still coming to us and suggesting other careers. We invite your readers to let us know of even more recommendations. We want to include everything we can.
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