Each of our students comes to us with a different and unique personal schedule.  When you enroll in our Professional Trainer’s Program, be prepared for:

• Take it seriously.  The Dog Training Profession is a career in teaching and coaching.  Good trainers keep families together, keep dogs in their homes, eliminate stress and frustration for the owner.  Whether you embark on a career in competition sports, family dog training, fear and aggression or other area of training, people will hire you to help them, to coach them and to teach them and their dog.  Take it seriously.
• Each module has a minimum amount of time that each student must spend working with dogs.  You can work with the dogs that are in our Daycamp program in Southbridge which is opened on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10 to 3.  Your work will be supervised by Donna Savoie or Kristine Rich.  If those hours are prohibitive for you, we try and accommodate each student, however you may need to take vacation from work or make other arrangements so that you can work with the Daycamp dogs in Southbridge on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays sometime between the hours of 10 to 3.
• Each module has required reading of books by incredible authors and scientists.  These books will be purchased, by you, at your cost and read along with and as part of the course material. It takes each student, on average, a month to 6 weeks to complete the reading material in each module.  During that period, you will have personal meetings with your mentor, some of them in person and some of them via video-conferencing as well as group meetings via video-conferencing and in person on a regular basis. 
• Your in-person meetings with your mentor are by appointment.  If you need to change your appointment, that change must be made no less than 7 days prior to the meeting.  Your mentor has confirmed your appointment on his/her calendar and will not be seeing other clients at that time.  Cancelling at the last minute impacts everyone’s schedules.  Meetings that are cancelled less than 7 days prior to the meeting can be made up at additional cost, currently $105 per meeting.
• Because this program is largely personalized for each individual student, we cannot lay out a blanket time schedule and tell you to set aside “X” amount of time per day.
• You will be required to apprentice for 300 hours before graduating.  This apprenticeship can take form in our group classes, daycamp services or private lessons as appropriate.  Said apprenticeship begins after all course materials have been completed and approved.
• Some of our students are not interested in teaching group classes, those persons, however, can assist in group classes with individual clients and not address the entire room as a group class teacher.  Some of our students are not interested in teaching the human end of the leash.  To those folks, however, we remind them that residence training, shelter work and other primarily dog training work still requires interpersonal skills and coaching skills albeit minimal.