How do you become a professional wilderness guide?

Are there any degrees you need, necessary guidelines to be met that will aid in employment, what is the pay like on average, who are the employers?How do you become a professional wilderness guide?
There are some formal qualifications you can get like a Mountain Leader Certificate, but no degree as such is needed.

Mostly you work for companies offering tourist trips to wild places, or rarely for the few government departments employing guides as well or in place of proper rangers.

You might for example be a specialist guide with a degree in ecology taking people on swamp wildlife tours for an educational department or a body like the Forestry Commission in which both outdoor knowledge of the area and how to move in it and navigate with precision, and specialist knowledge of a particular subject, are both needed.

You can also work for outdoor schools and on schemes like the Outward Bound or Duke of Edinburgh Award schemes for young people, which operate in the UK, or for similar schemes in other countries.

Pay can be miserable, and jobs might not be permanent, only seasonal. A few companies offering high-cost trips on popular routes like Kilimanjaro can pay decent money but most guides for those routes are accompanied by local guides as well, as part of regional development strageties for example that guarantee work for local people if foreigners are also involved, so the number of available posiions isn't high.

For example on Everest an ascent team must employ local sherpas or it won't get permission to go onto the mountain.

Here is a company offering Everest and other trips....there are dozens of others, and hundreds doing adventure trips all around the world. They all need staff in order to operate.

http://www.explorehimalaya.com/climbing_鈥?/a> . . . . .

You just get in touch, tell them what you've done, what scale of trips you are interested in, your availablity etc.

If they like it you get an interview.and maybe an assessment by their current staff.

If they like that bit you get a job or you're on the list for a job with maybe a hundred people above you on the list.

Never mind, you might only have ten above you on another list for another company.