Traineeship

The school-based traineeship includes theory, practical (workplace) and observational components for a total of 360 hours. Since starting the traineeship with the Australian Sports Academy in July I have completed approximately 120 hours of the practicals. On Tuesday, September 13th, I attended my first classroom day for my school-based fitness instructor traineeship. There are eight of these days throughout the traineeship. I have yet to have a workplace observation, however the first is now scheduled to take place on the 22nd of September.

The way it is going I will have completed all of my allowed practical hours before I get a chance to have the theory components, and that gives me cause for concern as I am not sure that I will benefit anywhere near as well from the traineeship if I do not have the theory to put into practice and to bed it down through that practice.   It also concerns me that as the schedule stands I will not complete the traineeship until mid-2012. My intention was to complete this by January, 2012 and then to begin on the Certificate IV program during Year 12.

As you may have realised there are many potential problems that can occur whilst undertaking a school based traineeship.  Assuming that they would ever read this I want to make some recommendations to help the Australian Sports Academy run their traineeships to a higher standard.

As far as anything is concerned  the number one problem is the timing of everything.

Theory days

If you miss a theory day (as I have done) you have to wait until another set of 'new' trainee's get to that point before you can continue.  To me there seems to be many strategies that can be employed to better ensure people can make the theory days.

One idea would be to run additional theory days during school holidays and have eight days throughout the holidays that you could attend in order to complete the traineeship.  However, it is important to keep in mind that you are given assignments in which you need time to work on, and therefore they need to spread the days apart.

Consistency of scheduling would also go a long way to addressing this issue.  The theory days should be the same day of the week as the work components.  For me, my work day is Thursday, but the theory days are Tuesdays.  Thursday was chosen as that provided the least conflict with my courses at school.

Another potential solution that I would like to put forward is to have an 'exam block' in which after attending all the theory lessons you attend a three day time period in which you have to complete numerous amounts of tests.

Observations
There's really nothing that I can say about observations as I haven't had any yet - except that maybe they need to be linked into the progress on the practical hours.

Practical
Practical (work) hours should be limited to keep pace with observations and theory days.  It would probably be easiest to break these up into 40 hour blocks.  For every theory day completed you need to work a complete block before the next theory day, and, for every block completed there must be an observation performed before the next block can commence.  The occupational health and safety component should be completed before any practical can commence.

Conclusion
By the way for anyone interested in attending the Australian Sports Academy, I just wanted to let you know that they now offer coaching, recreational sports managements and fitness instructor traineeships.  If they fix the several problems that have bitten me and possibly many other people this organisation could become a hit for students across Australia.

ASA website: http://www.australiansportsacademy.edu.au/