The chances of being hired in the state forest administrations vary between the federal states, which is due to the fact that the age structure of the employees is different and the forest administrations have different political status in the individual federal states. In addition to the state forest administrations, the federal forest administration, the chambers of agriculture, municipalities, nature conservation authorities and private forest administrations offer recruitment opportunities.
With a bachelor’s degree in forestry, you can apply for candidate and trainee positions in forest administrations. After 12-18 months of practical training in the company, you can then, for example, become a forest ranger and manage a forest district.
With a master's degree in forest sciences, there is the possibility of qualifying for a traineeship at the forest administration. (The study regulations provide information about the required combination of subjects). After a 2-year practical training course with a completed state forestry examination, you become an assessor of the forest service and can take on corresponding management functions in the forest administration, e.g. forestry office management, operations management, staff positions.
Please note that a bachelor's degree in forestry (for Anwärterdienst/ candidate service) or a bachelor's and master's degree in forestry (for Referendariat/ traineeship) is mandatory for a career in public forest management.

Good career opportunities are offered by companies in the woodworking and processing industry and the wood trade, some of which operate worldwide. Entry here is usually achieved by participating in a trainee program or by contacting individual institutes in this faculty with the relevant companies.

In addition to the practice-oriented professional fields, the graduates of this faculty have the option of pursuing an academic career in research. The path to an academic career begins after the master's degree with a doctorate of several years, in which a dissertation (doctoral thesis) is prepared. Possible employers are universities, colleges, forest research institutes and other public research facilities/institutes.

As a result of the reform of the course, more professional fields in international organizations were opened up. These include projects in development cooperation (e.g. GIZ) and in the scientific field (CARBOEUROPE, LBA), international organizations such as the World Bank, UNEP or CIFOR as well as forest administrations and ministries abroad and nature conservation organizations operating worldwide.

In Germany, the management of private and corporate forests is increasingly being carried out by private service companies. In the meantime, these services also extend to the areas of nature conservation and landscape management, which means that there are further opportunities for “starting a business”.

Outside of the purely forestry-related fields, graduates of this faculty also work in completely different areas, such as journalism, politics, education or agriculture. Of course they have to compete with the graduates of the specialized fields here. In doing so, however, they benefit from their wide-ranging specialist knowledge of ecological, technical, economic and political relationships and their ability to bring these different areas together to solve complex problems.