Missouri Department of Conservation in search of future agents

The department requires any applicant to have a Bachelor’s Degree. The applicants will then be required to go through two sets of interviews, with the second being a more strenuous line of questioning.

After making their way through the interviews and background checks, the MDC will then send the applicants through numerous tests to examine their physical condition. The tests include finishing a mile and a half run in 16 minutes and 30 seconds, 19 pushups and 25 setups in a minute, a vertical jump and an agility test.

“Once we get all the results back from the testing day, we make our final cuts,” Ham said. “We then make final conditional offers for them to be starting our academy as an employee for the Missouri Department of Conservation.”

Once the offer is accepted, the trainees will spend 26 weeks in Jefferson City at the Missouri Department of Highway Patrol dormitories. The trainees will be there Monday through Friday, except for the weeks when they’re required to travel for training.

The MDC provides its employees with benefits such as health insurance, life insurance, tuition reimbursement, paid vacation, and a handful of other benefits. The average yearly salary for a conservation agent is $46,092.

Ham said that one of the best benefits of working for the department is the job security that comes with the career.

“Our agency has planned for the future, and knock on wood, even in the pandemic years that we’ve had, you had a secured position,” Ham said. “I had heard that in other states, they were furloughing employees because of budgets constraints. We are very fortunate in the state of Missouri that the people have chosen to help fund the agency with a sales tax, and that has helped us plan for the future.”

While the government agency provides its employees with benefits that make a career in wildlife conservation attractive to candidates, Ham says that the benefits goes are beyond monetary value.

“It’s not just the value that agents bring to the agency, it’s also the values they have within those communities,” Ham said. “I think there will be people that will say of you when you retire, ‘Hey, I remember when you gave my son a stick or when you did that snake program,’ or ‘We had three generations that remember you as our agent.’ Those are the things that bring the value to not only what the agent does, but also to what is so important, and those are the natural resources that we have been given to look over for the time being and make sure that they are there for future generations.”