Davey Tree Flipbooks

March/April 2016 | 17 A Basic Pruning Workshop trainer teaches his group how to properly prune small trees and brush. Education and training is key regardless of your age or what title you hold. It's important to constantly learn from your fellow employees and experts in the industry – even if you have been with Davey for decades. Davey's Charlie Keppel, sales arborist at Barrington, Illinois, The Care of Trees (TCOT) office, understands this concept well. That's why Keppel, past president of the Illinois Landscape Contractors Association (ILCA), has been chairman of the ILCA Basic Pruning Workshop event for 20 years. The workshop is intended to expand the minds of new and seasoned professionals alike. "Each year, we offer to prune small trees and shrubs for free in order to secure a location," Keppel says. For the 2015 ILCA pruning workshop, Keppel chose Schaumburg Boomers Baseball Park in Schaumburg, Illinois. The ballpark proved the perfect arena for both indoor classroom work and outdoor demonstrations. The workshop started with a presentation about the four main topics of pruning, including the biology of the tree, safety training, pruning tools and proper pruning cuts. The class was taught in both English and Spanish. The 2015 Basic Pruning Workshop was a homerun, with more than 150 diverse attendees, including landscapers, parks employees and municipal workers from the Chicago area. The participants split into 10 groups led by a trainer. Keppel picks the trainers from past workshops.This is where Keppel's philosophy of train-the-trainers comes full circle. Over the last 20 years, Keppel has helped train more than 1,000 profes- sionals in the field. Each year this number grows, and the result is better trained and more proficient tree care experts at Davey and beyond. "I enjoy seeing people who attended the workshop come back as trainers and teach the next generation," Keppel says. "Hopefully, the 150 attendees from this year's workshop will go back to their offices and share with their crews the knowledge they learned." 20 YEARS OF TREE TRAINING "It helped me relate to the challenges our clients face when we use technical language to explain tree jobs. Most of the people I worked with were park district folks who were frequently assigned tasks in the field and were unsure and questioned them- selves how to properly accomplish it. We gave them the lessons and tools to be confident going back to those jobs and to do them correctly. It was very apparent that light bulbs went off and they said, 'Ah, I get it.' It was quite an enlightening experience." – Loren Nagy, sales arborist, Lake Bluff office of The Care of Trees He was a first-time trainer at the Basic Pruning Workshop this year. Nagy said it was interesting for him to work with such a diverse group of people in the industry and explain pruning in basic terminology.

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