Mr Michael Teh Hock Beng, 66, the managing director of Nature Landscapes, has been in the horticulture industry for 40 years.

Yesterday, the advocate of lifelong learning won a SkillsFuture Fellowship Award, while his company got a SkillsFuture Employer Award.

"Lifelong learning is truly what it means - life; long. You need to just tell yourself that you cannot stop learning. Otherwise, you will become a relic of the past," he said.

He is now keen to enrol in an arborist programme to be certified by the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA), as well as a Certified Practising Horticulturist Programme.

Both are joint initiatives by ISA and the Australian Institute of Horticulture respectively with the Centre for Urban Greenery and Ecology, a division of the National Parks Board.

Mr Teh said he wanted to enrol in them to be a "responsible practitioner" and to show his colleagues that it is "never too old to learn".

He has a degree in estate management from the National University of Singapore, but, inspired by his mother's love for gardening and his own interest in plants, set up Nature Landscapes in 1981 with six employees. Today, he has more than 500 staff.

Mr Teh and Ms Jacqueline Allan, 53, an executive director at Nature Landscapes, developed an exclusive training curriculum for employees with the aim of becoming a premium landscape company.

It was revised in 2017 and involves on-the-job training, learning from fellow colleagues and off-the-shelf courses in areas like soft skills.

Said Mr Teh: "We would not have achieved all this without having the technical abilities to become a garden city. All this does take skills, technology and knowledge."