Outdoor education professional: What I do and how much I make

0:00My name is Sienna I'm 28 years old, and I'm the Outreach and Admissions Coordinator for the Colorado Outward Bound School. I make $42,000 a year. So Outward Bound is an organization that sends students of all walks of life on challenging wilderness experiences.

0:16Our courses range anywhere from eight days all the way up to 82 days in length, and we start students as young as 12, take 'em as old as you can get your doctor to sign off to go on these programs. My main responsibility as the Outreach and Admissions Coordinator is that I'm the first point of contact most people have with Outward Bound.

0:36Whether they call in to our informational hotline, I meet them at a school or community event, or we wind up running into each other just in the social fabric of Denver, I'm the person that gets to represent what Outward Bound is all about, and help explain to them what an experience might be like.

0:55I've got anywhere from five to maybe 100 potential students calling me at any given time, and because I wanna make sure that they're all equally prepared for their Outward Bound experience, I need to take pretty thorough notes on every conversation I have. The same goes for my design of custom programs, I don't wanna accidentally design the program that I talked about with company A, for company B, because that's not great customer service.

1:25As with any nonprofit organization, I need to be willing to step in and able to lend a helping hand to my teammates. A lot of jobs in this type of industry are kind of a catch-all position, and you wind up getting to explore projects in areas of the company that you didn't even know existed, and that's something that I really value about my current position.

1:48An example of that would be that we have a partnership with Backpacker magazine, and I was able to help them co-create some online outdoors skills classes, and I got to help write the curriculum and do the filming of these classes, and that was something I never even knew that Outward Bound did on a regular basis, and then stepping into a more office and supportive type of role, I was able to be an active member of that project.

2:15Because I've only been in my job for one year, I don't know a whole lot about how potential increases of my salary are gonna work. I think that in the future, my salary might be structured differently because my job has a sales focus to it. I do have a little bit of a commission, and that, I've included in my salary of $42,000.

2:40So it can fluctuate depending on what my commission rate is at any particular time. My salary might change in the way that I get a lower base salary, but a higher commission, or the other way around, a higher base salary but a lower commission. People come into this field because they love to explore.

2:59They're adventurous; they like to try new things, and they're excited about sharing their passion with other people, and I love surrounding myself with like-minded people who equally believe that through wilderness experience, we can change our communities, and therefore make the world a better place.

3:19And I've found that to be true whether I'm teaching skiing at a down-home ski resort in the winter, or guiding trips for Outward Bound, or answering the phone in my basement office.