Anyone have any experience with educating adventures or peak leaders?
Thats who im thinking of doing the courses with
My personal opinion is that these kind of courses for most people are a rip-off and just not worth it.
Allow me to explain why....
Provided you can already Ski or Snowboard to a reasonable degree, it's not difficult to pass your level 1 Ski or Snowboard Instructor qualification, whether in this country, or say with the Canadian body (CASI/CSIA).
When you take the instructor qualification exam, you are actually getting all the coaching and training you need to complete it as part of the fee. Using Canada as an example, I was able to book a test with CASI (Canadian Association of Snowboard Instructors) in Whistler, it was about $275 a the time. That was two and a half days of training, then on the final afternoon you were tested. The majority of people pass. You now have all the qualifications you need to actually teach in whatever countries your body is represented.
With these camps, you can now see why paying £8495 to get the qualification when you can do it yourself for a tiny fraction of the cost is quite extreme!
Now some of these camps will try and get you to Level 2 qualification, which is obviously a little tougher. However rather than just training to try and get this with a camp, it makes more sense to actually teach as a Level 1 instructor somewhere, where you will become better and your employer is likely to actually fund your Level 2 for you. Again as an example, I know that Whistler Blackcomb do this with their instructors, intact if you are lucky enough to get through in the job fair for a Ski/Snowboard Instructor, they will even pay for your Level 1.
Further to this... say you pass your Level 2 on one of these instructor courses, does it guarantee you any kind of job when you finish? Nope. If your lucky and the resort has a need, they might take you on as a new instructor, however you've paid a lot for training with no promise of any job.
The next criticism has to be largely levied at Canada specifically. Say you do one of these courses in Canada and get CASI/CSIA qualified this is largely useless if you aren't ever going to be a permanent resident of Canada. It's not recognised in Europe, which is obviously closest to us Brits and where we can work. You would need BASI qualifications.
So in the end you've paid a lot of money for a qualification that you will probably never use, but which you could have done while doing a regular winter season for very little comparatively.
A lot of these companies make their money because it's an easy way for gap year students to convince their parents to part with the cash, because it looks like they are learning something.
