Challenger TAFE
Landscape Design

If you’re a people-person with a love of reading and learning and a passion for design, landscapes, and creating garden spaces, then a career as a landscape designer could suit you down to the ground.

Designing landscapes and gardens is a profession requiring many different skills and abilities, so you’ll need to be multi-talented – creatively, numerically and logistically. This is a service industry often involving clients’ lives and emotions, so you’ll need to be an excellent listener and clever at turning clients needs and wants into a design that works.
 
The practice of landscape and garden design is heavily-influenced by fashion, architecture, climate and social change, so there is a lot to learn and practitioners need to be very well-informed across a broad range of issues, ideas and concepts.

For those of you wanting to tackle such an exciting and challenging career, Challenger TAFE’s Certificate IV in Landscape Design is the perfect way to gain all the skills and knowledge you need to become a successful landscape design practitioner.

The training is particularly fantastic if you are…

• a landscape contractor and are looking to “get off the tools” or add value to your business,

• have developed skills from associated industries,

• have undertaken an apprenticeship or gained work experience within Horticulture and Landscape organisations,

• have a garden maintenance or related businesses and want to up-skill, or

• are wanting to change careers and enter the landscape design industry.

The course is run here at Challenger TAFE’s extensive and well-equipped Murdoch Campus and has been developed to be advanced, professional-level training.

This hands-on and practical qualification is a great pathway into a fast-growing and ever-changing industry and will make you highly-competent and immediately ready for work.

Due to the advanced level of training, prospective students need to be prepared to enter an intensive program involving a broad range of technical and management skills that may include group or team projects.

The training covers:

• establishing a design practice with business planning and management, marketing and promotion, and legal requirements,
• recognising and materials, products and structures,
• providing specialist advice to clients,
• undertaking site assessments,
• preparing designs for landscapes from courtyards to acreages,
• planning plant establishment and maintenance programs,
• using computer-aided design, and
• development  of personal and professional skills and abilities.

When you graduate, you will be an accomplished practitioner of the profession who is aware of all associated areas that connect to landscape and garden design and can advise clients on sustainability processes and methods such as greywater systems, outdoorenergy efficiency, water tanks and plant selection. You’ll also be able to apply for membership of manyindustry organisations.

There’s no doubt that landscape and garden design can be a thoroughly engrossing and rewarding career choice. It is a brain workout to design a landscape – Landscape Designersalwayshave to consider four dimensions when they are working, and switch from creativity to practicality often and seamlessly. To go from the initial client contact and site assessment to seeing your design built and installed, and then enjoyed and appreciated by the clients is job satisfaction to an unusual degree.

By training in Landscape Design with Challenger TAFE you’ll get a nationally-recognised and industry-relevant qualification ready to launch you into this diverse and fulfilling career.

For more information about Challenger TAFE visit www.challengertafe.wa.edu.au
Or call (08) 9229 8413