We all know what equestrian social media can be like, so I decided to use the good people of Facebook’s inherent desire to share their opinions to my advantage. There are hundreds of equestrian Facebook pages: regional, buy and sell, general chat and everyone’s favourite: ****eventersunite.
I specifically looked for threads which were about qualifications, studying, becoming qualified to do a specific job, or simply from people who wanted to formalise their experience in some way.
Findings
As with all equestrian Facebook pages opinions vary hugely and you don’t know how reliable the individuals giving the advice are, but the conversations are interesting as they do reflect may of the key themes discussed in Part 1.
I reviewed social media posts over a four year period. The common questions which arose can be grouped into these queries:
- “I find it confusing and overwhelming to find the right qualification for me.”
- “I don’t understand what [my specific interest] within the industry requires of me.”
- “I don’t know if the qualification I’m looking at means anything.”
- “Do I actually need a qualification to do [insert career that requires qualifications and professional registration]?”
For every comment saying that people suggesting a qualification, there were many more suggesting that experience was more relevant and valued than qualifications.
Comments varied hugely, with some people very happy to take someone’s advice if some else they trusted rated the person. The most common theme in the responses was that first hand experience is the most important thing. However, there was no discussion at all of the fact that there is no way to evidence first hand experience, or acknowledgement that essentially people could just make it up.
It was clear across the various threads that the BHS Pathways are the most well known, well respected, and robust. As there are scholarship and funding options available for them too, that makes them an attractive option for many. BHS Pathways are professional qualifications which mean that they lead to direct employment opportunities. However, they were not without critique – which although not robust – eludes to a general lack of respect within the sector for formal qualifications in general.
Honestly I NEVER ask instructors what qualifications they have – my main concern is that they compete and do well at a higher level than me.
These conversations largely centre around becoming qualified to teach (even if the original thread was non-specific in nature), and there is clear messaging that many think that the level at which people compete and their experience is more valuable than a teaching qualification. It highlights the importance of qualifications within the industry being respected, well known, recognised and also directly related to high standards as responders gravitate towards the BHS irrespective of its relevance to the original question. The BHS provides qualifications related to teaching and grooming across different sectors, but they do not regulate the many other spheres of equestrian employment that exist.
Where individuals ask specifically about alternative careers such as equine physiotherapy, dentistry, saddle fitting and nutrition, the advice being given in the comments sections becomes more inaccurate and unhelpful.
Generalised advice about entrance qualifications to certain qualifications and degrees was often unhelpful and misguided. The majority of people commenting on such threads were talking about their own experiences (perhaps not ironically given the paragraphs above, much of this advice was often not generalisable). Although everyone responding was well intentioned, it is clear the lack of transparent and accessible advice is contributing to a culture of misunderstanding and lack of respect towards formal education within the equine industry.
Key Themes
Equestrians have a large presence on social media and it is always a source of great debate, information and advice. It paints a very clear picture of the types of conversations that you can have in the tack room and whilst waiting in line at the burger van of a horse show. It played a useful role in this project by providing evidence for the anecdotal conversation and understanding that inspired the development of EQUK.
The key themes that can be drawn from the review of social media posts are as follows:
- Lack of clarity: with regard to what qualifications are robust and reliable, as well as where to go about finding them. These two points are essentially one in the same, as reliable providers of qualifications have a reputation which sells its content. If there was a reliable source to find equestrian qualifications, this would make it easier for individuals to find and recognising a study option suitable for them. Without having somewhere reliable to find them, people struggle to recognise what is a useful investment of their time, and consequently are likely disengage from the process altogether.
- Lack of respect for qualifications: there is a generalised sense that qualifications are less reliable than experience. This is in part related to the fact that because qualifications (aside from the BHS) lack a prestige factor, because there is a lack of understanding of what specific qualifications actually mean, it feeds into a culture where there is a disregard for them altogether. However, without qualifications, there is no way to formalise experience, therefore qualifications are necessary to promote safety, high standards and legitimacy.
- Lack of understanding: individuals only have their own experiences, or experiences of their friends, as a frame of reference. This creates a culture of misunderstanding and misinformation as there is no centralised resource explaining the process in an overarching way, tying together the UK’s education system and the context of the equestrian world. This culture creates a barrier as again where someone does not understand something, they feel as though they do not belong there and subsequently is more likely to stop pursuing the path, which also ties into the conversations held both at Ebony and Equilearn.
The primary message from the social media review is that there is a clear need within the industry in order to promote better standards for it to be easier for individuals to engage in qualifications and study which cultivates an environment for knowledge to be shared in a healthy way.
The lack of clarity that currently exists creates a lack of trust in education within the sector. Qualifications should be valued more than they are within the industry because they promote better standards for both horses and humans. In order to facilitate education being more well respected, there needs to be a centralised resource of industry recognised qualifications which is well known, recognised and trusted.
What next?
The evidence gathered through social media review tied nicely into the conversations and themes which had emerged from the hands on research I had conducted. Using this, I began to structure a practical framework which would translate into a model that could be use both as a means to generate profit to make the social impact it needed.
The social media research demonstrated clearly that providers of equestrian qualifications that were not BHS need to gain credibility by improving their marketing. However, for an industry of this scale and complexity, this is not something which can be done on a micro level. It needs something bigger as there is power in numbers. This is particularly important for the applied professional accreditation qualifications which are required to operate within specific professions – as there was a lot of confusion on social media about what was necessary.
There also needs to be work done to improve the marketing of generalist qualifications: horse care and equine science type qualifications which are non-specific in nature but provide excellent foundational knowledge. These qualifications are key to improving accessibility to the industry: bridging the gap between the knowledge and experience individuals from non-traditional equestrian backgrounds struggle to get. There was a lot of negative rhetoric around these online “they don’t give you the necessary experience,” or they “don’t prepare you to work on a yard.” Whilst perhaps you wouldn’t step out of one of these courses knowing how to run a livery yard, you also don’t graduate from any undergraduate degree knowing how to do a specific job. It’s about the skills and knowledge you have gained: learning to apply it in the real world always comes after. EQUK can work to build pathways between different educational institutions and opportunities to help set prospective staff up to succeed within the industry in a proactive way.
The research I had conducted to this point demonstrated the student recruitment issues education providers experience around their equestrian programmes could be directly linked to the narrative that exists within the industry, but there was a straight forward solution. It had also demonstrated that despite the sometime negative narrative that existed around education within the equestrian industry, there was an appetite amongst individuals to gain knowledge and qualifications – but were being put off by the current lack of readily available resources.
The next step was to create a resource that gave learners what they needed whilst meeting the needs of the education providers to attract investment.
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