NB. This survey was conducted within the U.S, however I can confidently assume that the figures can be related to the fitness industry anywhere in the world. Besides, they did approach over 80,000 fitness professionals to come to the following conclusions, which is VERY thorough.
From the article:
The National Council on Strength And Fitness has recently completed its industry-wide personal trainer role delineation study. The goal is to define the scope of practice for the personal trainer and ensure the knowledge and skill set of the practitioner correlates with the required job tasks.
In order to achieve this, the organization reached out to over 80,000 industry professionals representing the various aspects of the profession including; academics, facilities management and ownership, corporate and independent personal training, and strength and conditioning.
One particular component of the study is to collect and process demographic information in efforts to best identify market dynamics and trends in the work force. Of the persons that completed the survey portion of the study this is what was identified.
What this basically means is that the NCSF asked a LOT of personal trainers and fitness professionals who they are, what they're doing now and how long they've been doing it for.
Some of the results are quite surprising as you'll see and some of the figures simply reiterate a lot of what we already know and that many personal trainers are really struggling out there.
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It's interesting to note that around 31% of surveyed fitness professionals are currently working as personal trainers, around the same amount aren't.
It also seems that the 10 year mark as a personal trainer is the magic hurdle with over 20% of people surveyed having been in the industry 10+. Maybe they feel that it's too late to switch professions, or that's how long it takes the average fitpro to establish their personal training career?
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I find that difficult to believe, though I'm not sure how pedantic they were with their questions...maybe they consider vacuuming to be not working as a trainer 100% of the time?
It's also very reassuring to see that we're a very well educated bunch of people with over 73% of those surveyed holding a Bachelors Degree or higher. Of those however, based on the statistics of how long trainers are staying in the game, I'm guessing not many of those degrees are business related...
If you enjoy this sort of thing as much as I do, maybe you have an opinion on some of these results. Do any of those statistics surprise you?
Leave your comments below and feel free to share this article on facebook and twitter by clicking the icons at the top...I know around 5% of you will. :)
Thanks for reading and thanks NCSF for conducting this awesome survey!
Ben
You can find the full article on the NCSF website by clicking here.
I was surprised so many have degrees. I imagine they must be working with top athletes or something, I certainly don't see many of them in the gyms around.
ReplyDeleteI was not surprised so many are either not practicing or do very little actual PT work, it explains a lot about the industry and fitness education system generally, as well as online discussions.
Thanks Kyle and I agree. I assume may of the degrees are sports related and Phys Ed.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with the industry education system. At the end of the day, they are operating a business that needs to turn a profit and can only focus on so many topics with any real juice.
Makes you wonder what the real issue is with so many falling by the wayside...it was clearly a dream for them to become fitness professionals or they wouldn't have invested so much time and money.
Disappointed expectations.
ReplyDeleteSo many thought it would be all about hot chicks in lycra or hot guys in tank tops, and/or working with top athletes all the time. And others just took the PT session fee of $60/hr, multiplied it by 40hr/week, and figured that'd be their income.
The PT schools don't outright lie, but they lie by omission - nobody corrects these misconceptions.
Over at the Fitness Australia groupsite right now, there's some guy from a WA school going on about measuring heart rate, RPE, wind speed and humidity for sessions for later referral. When I challenged him on the usefulness of this, he said "but we do it with these professional footballers!"
And of course, the vast majority of fitness professionals will never work with professional athletes. Most of us will be lucky to get amateur athletes, fit and strong people actually willing to compete in something.
But that's not how it's presented in the stock photos of PTs with clients, and in the courses.
People get into something expecting one thing, it turns out to be something different, so they drop out. Not surprising, really.
That and the money does it.
Good points. Based on that...who are the 30 odd percent that stick it out? Do you think that they have a different professional background or do you think that an individuals personal agenda comes into play?
ReplyDeleteWhat about this 'Lazy Gen Y' thing that people talk about so often?
Like most people, I've heard the ads on the radio and seen the billboards advertising this exciting lifestyle paying minimum $50 an hour etc. etc. and there is every potential for every individual to achieve that as a minimum, however, it definitely does not come gift wrapped.
Given it's a U.S. based survey much of it will be sports related given their focus on sport I would imagine.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to find a local survey. I would imagine that people drop out due to a lack of business skills. It's one thing to train people and be passionate about fitness, and another completely to run a business. As you said Ben it does not come "gift wrapped". I have heard of two trainers recently in my area that have dropped out because it's "all too hard".
In a market now saturated with over 20,000 registered trainers and god knows how many who aren't, it's no wonder people drop out.
PT's are there to help people uncover the primary reason for wanting to get in shape and help them stay on track. That's it. It helps to be knowledgeable obviously but let's face it, most people don't care.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's much to do with "lazy Gen Y." It's simply that the years of 15-25 or so are the years where you are searching for how you'll spend your life. These are the years when you'll go through lots of different courses, jobs, friends, hobbies, and sexual partners. This is true in any era or culture when people of that age actually had a choice in what they did - they chose to do lots of different things to try them out.
ReplyDeleteThose of any age who stay in the profession, from what I've seen they're either very good or very bad. It's hard to stick with things you suck at, so most of them drift away - except for those who suck at everything. I've met some crappy trainers who've been in it for years, but when you ask about their other careers and life, well they're pretty dismal in the rest, too. So really they have no choice.
The ones who are good and stay, well they stay because it's fun doing something you're good at, and of course you'll have people's respect, earn money at it, etc - which encourages you to keep going.
So we're left with a whole swag of people who are fair to middling at their training job, and it's among them we see the big turnover.
That's my theory and I'm sticking to it until I change my mind.