There are hundreds of equine specific qualifications on the market these days, and choosing the right one can be challenging. However, having the correct foundations laid as an equine professional is crucial.
At EQUK, we know that in the equine industry there can be a negative narrative surrounding education: you will often hear that ‘you don’t need a qualification,’ or that ‘experience is more important.’ Part of the research that created EQUK focused on the narratives that existed online around qualifications vs experiences: and the tension that exists between the two in the modern horse industry.
Whilst it is undoubted that when it comes to horses, hands on experience is essential, it is also very important to acknowledge the importance of education as a foundation.
Why Qualifications Matter
Formal equestrian qualifications are essential for a few reasons:
- Safety and Knowledge: Proper training helps to ensure not only your safety but also the safety of the horses and clients you work with. Equestrian qualifications teach essential skills, from horse care and management to riding and training.
- Professional Standards: Qualifications uphold industry standards. A structured curriculum, guarantees that certain competencies are met, builds trust in your abilities as a professional. Even if you have decades of experience, the easiest shorthand to demonstrate that to your clients is a qualification. With social licensing and welfare standards in the equine industry under scrutiny, this has never been more important.
- Career Progression: In many cases, qualifications are necessary to progress professionally. The more education you can access, the more your knowledge will grow, and the more services you can eventually offer.
- Insurance Requirements: Many insurers require formal qualifications to underwrite liability policies for equestrian professionals. Additionally, many insurers require you to be a member of a professional membership body, which require you to hold certain qualifications in order to join.
Education also provides access to opportunities that otherwise would not be available to you. Whilst general horse care and equine studies qualifications may not lead directly to professional accreditation or specific careers, they provide the access to knowledge that without education individuals may not have been able to obtain.
Riding schools are great places to learn, but not everyone can go there regularly, and not all yards are able to offer hands on horse care opportunities. Additionally, they often do not provide the opportunities to learn about competing or more nuanced or specialist aspects of horse care. Across the UK, many yards have closed since the pandemic, and opportunities to volunteer have reduced since COVID regulations came in (and in many cases, were not lifted). This means that to access this baseline level of hands on experience, young people nowadays must access it through formal educational institutions.
Often these generalist type qualifications are not the most suitable if you have either grown up around horses, or have had ample opportunities to work on yards. However, they should not be viewed negatively or ‘less than’ hands on experience, and should instead be seen as a stepping stone to the next part of an individual’s professional story, particularly for those who could not access those initial formative opportunities.
Additionally, it is worth noting that just because you do have hands on experience, means that there are not things you can learn from education. Our personal experiences are just that, personal, and often if we have not met a horse with a specific condition, or encountered a certain problem, we’ve not developed the skills or knowledge that comes from that. The more experiences and opportunities to learn we are exposed to, the more that we can we can grow our knowledge base.
The Role of Experience
In the real world, every horse is different, and we will encounter things we could never have read about in a book. Equally, we can’t experience every unique problem or situation a horse will throw at us. We should be mindful to not prescribe to only one mentor, or way of learning: as that only narrows our experiences down to that of one or two individuals or yards. Instead, it’s a good idea to get experience where you can from different yards, environments, and ways working. Riding schools work very differently to competition yards, horses and staff there have very different needs, and they are fundamentally individual skill-sets, with some overlap.
Experience also helps you develop an intuitive understanding of horses—something that can’t be entirely taught in a classroom. You learn to read their body language and develop a ‘feel.’ This insight only comes from spending hours with horses and observing their behavior in various situations.
You should be mindful that just because you have a lot of one type of experience, that you do not need to gain more. We are all learning all the time, and truly never stop when you work with horses. It’s important to try to not be ‘insecure’ about your knowledge or experience: embrace what you have, show gratitude for what you have learned, and accept there will always be others with different experiences to ours. Life and education is not a competition, our journeys are not linear, and they are unique. We are all on our own paths.
Choosing Your Path
The best way to identify what qualifications are right for you is to essentially reverse engineer the situation.
- Where do you want to end up, and why? Focus on what that situation would make you feel, and why you think that situation will make you feel that way. That is your ‘why,’ and is going to help you stay motivated on your learning journey. Staying connected to that feeling of ‘why’ will also help you to identify which opportunities you need to take or aim for.
- What practical steps do you need to take to get there? What types of professional membership/insurance/experience do you need to be able to do you desired profession? You should think about your current skill set, and any gaps in your knowledge, experience or confidence you feel you need to overcome.
- What are the parameters you are working within to achieve this goal? Are you limited by geography, travel opportunities, or caring responsibilities? These are practical questions you must answer for yourself and will help you decide where to study, working around the things in your life you can and can’t change. If this step starts to feel overwhelming, take time to reconnect with your ‘why.’
- Which qualifications offer you what you need, within your parameters? Based on what you know about what you need to do, what options are available to you? If something isn’t ‘perfect’ you shouldn’t be put off, and instead think about ways round the things that are putting you off, as they are opportunities to grow.
We can help you with this!