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Elementary occupations · code 9214

Garden and horticultural labourers

Garden and horticultural labourers perform simple and routine tasks in operations to cultivate and maintain trees, shrubs, flowers and other plants in parks and private gardens, to produce saplings, bulbs and seeds, or to grow vegetables and flowers by intensive cultivation techniques. Tasks include - (a) loading, unloading and moving supplies, produce and equipment; (b) preparing garden sites and plots using hand tools and simple machines; (c) assisting with planting and transplanting flowers, shrubs, trees and lawns; (d) maintaining gardens by watering, weeding and mowing lawns; (e) cleaning gardens and removing rubbish; (f) assisting with propagating, planting and potting seeds, bulbs and cuttings; (g) tending plants by hand watering and weeding; (h) harvesting and packaging plants for sale and transport; (i) performing minor repairs on fixtures, buildings, equipment and fences. Examples of the occupations classified here: - Garden labourer - Horticultural labourer - Lawn mower - Nursery labourer Some related occupations classified elsewhere: - Horticulturist - 6113 - Landscape gardener - 6113 - Market gardener - 6113 - Crop farm labourer - 9211

None of this job's tasks scored high enough to count. It ranks 25 of 427 for holding up against AI.

Also known as

  • garden labourer

Job titles from the EU's ESCO list. Search for any of them on the jobs page and you'll end up here.

88.4
Holds up
against AI Not Exposed

AI could take on 11.6 of 100, on average
so it holds up at 100 − 11.6 = 88.4

That's the whole sum, and you can check it against the ILO's study.

61.3
How hands-on
out of 100

From O*NET, averaged across 2 US jobs

33.5
How fiddly
and cramped

finger skill 38.5 · hand skill 46.4 · cramped spaces 15.5 · averaged

Kind of hands-on work · hands-on 50+ · fiddly under 39.4 Hands-on, less fiddly work

Less fine handwork and fewer cramped spaces than a typical hands-on job. That clears one hurdle for machines. It doesn't mean machines are doing this work yet.

estimated O*NET 31.0 BLS occupational crosswalk chain ISCO-08 to 2010 SOC (Aug 2012, rev. Jun 2015); 2010 to 2018 SOC (Nov 2017); O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy data 0.7-work-setting measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

This number is probably too high

This score only looks at AI tools like chatbots. It doesn't look at robots at all — and this job rates 61.3 out of 100 for how hands-on it is, which is exactly where robots come in.

Have a look at the tasks below and judge for yourself. The ILO scored them low because a chatbot can't do them. Whether a machine with hands could is a different question, and we can't answer it yet.

The tasks behind the score

The score is the average of these. A job is really a bundle of tasks, and an average can hide how uneven that bundle is.

The task AI could do most of scores 14.8, while the average is 11.6. A big gap means some of this job is wide open to AI and some of it barely at all. That's quite different from a job where everything sits somewhere in the middle, even when the averages match.

  1. 14.8

    Harvesting and packaging plants for sale and transport

    Very Low
  2. 13.5

    Performing minor repairs on fixtures, buildings, equipment and fences.

    Very Low
  3. 12.5

    Maintaining gardens by watering, weeding and mowing lawns

    Very Low
  4. 11.8

    Preparing garden sites and plots using hand tools and simple machines

    Very Low
  5. 11.5

    Assisting with propagating, planting and potting seeds, bulbs and cuttings

    Very Low
  6. 11

    Loading, unloading and moving supplies, produce and equipment

    Very Low
  7. 11

    Assisting with planting and transplanting flowers, shrubs, trees and lawns

    Very Low
  8. 9.4

    Tending plants by hand watering and weeding

    Very Low
  9. 8.8

    Cleaning gardens and removing rubbish

    Very Low

9 tasks · the High to Very Low labels are the ILO's

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.7-work-setting

Compared with similar jobs

There are 33 jobs in the “Elementary occupations” group, averaging 84.9. This one is above that.