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Entry Standards

Assessment through the Competency Framework

As the professional body for the landscape sector, it is the Landscape Institute’s role to continually reflect the changing needs of landscape practitioners, helping them remain trusted, relevant and successful, today and in the future.

To enable this, we developed the LI Competency Framework which provides a structured method of gauging the abilities of practitioners within the landscape sector. It is designed to demonstrate and articulate the requisite knowledge and skills of a landscape professional at various levels of proficiency and experience.

View the Competency Framework

How the Framework is used

The framework underpins the various routes to Technician, Chartered and Fellow membership for landscape practitioners from a wide range of fields of practice, from landscape architects, to landscape designers, to parks managers to arboriculturists and beyond.

Maintaining these standards enables the sector to be at the forefront of the challenges against climate change and guardians of the natural and built environment. They are central to all of the LI’s work in education, from accreditation to apprenticeships, and for members in terms of their CPD and assessment of membership.

Encompassing professional competencies, core landscape competencies, and additional landscape competencies, the framework is flexible, adaptable and will support landscape professionals as they progress through their career. 

“The framework helps us ensure that we’re meeting the ever-growing needs of the sector as we fight against the climate crisis whilst ensuring we maintain robust and rigorous standards of professionalism.”

Jane Findlay, FLI, Immediate Past President of the Landscape Institute and Director of Fira

The Competency Framework structure

The Competency Framework reflects the common skills that the landscape professionals need in order to deliver professional advice to others. There are three competency categories – Professional, Core, and Additional – which mirror the importance of those competencies in the real world.

In addition, an individual’s level of achievement in each competency is assessed, from having an understanding, to expert knowledge and experience in the subject.

View the Competency Framework

Got a question?

If you have any further questions about the Competency Framework, then please let us know.

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“Coming from a parks and green space management background, I’ve often felt there was no obvious professional home for parks people, nowhere to obtain quality training and skills that would be recognised nationally and that we were not part of the wider landscape sector. Joining the LI has meant not only do I now have a professional home, I’ve been able to work to open up the routes to entry, to help create a diverse and supportive community of landscape professionals in the broadest sense.”

Sue Ireland, FLI, Consultant, past Director of Open Spaces, City of London and member of the LI’s Entry Standards Steering Group.