So you want to be a holistic therapist and you're ready to start your training but every where you look everyone is talking about accreditation, but what does it actually mean?
What is Accreditation?
In the UK the beauty and holistic therapy industry is unregulated. This means that there are no legal requirements for any formal training or for you to hold any specific qualifications. As a result treatment and training standards can vary wildly, from fabulous to failure.
To try and combat this a number of professional bodies have popped up who will accredit specific training courses where they meet the requirements they have set out. This usually means certain elements must be included, like health and safety, anatomy etc, that the course has a minimum number of hours, a certain quality of content and specific assessment criteria.
Where a course meets these requirements then the particular professional body will accredit it, meaning they will put their name to it as a way of showing that it is a good quality course which meets acceptable standards and the training provider will be able to use their logo.
Why Do You Care?
Accredited courses are usually more expensive and often have much stricter requirements so it's easy to think, as there are no legal requirements, that you don't need to bother with these courses and can opt for one of the (many) cheaper and easier courses you've seen floating around and, you can, however....
Insurance - if you haven't taken an accredited course then you won't be able to get insurance. It's as simple as that and no insurance means no cover if something goes wrong.
Quality - accreditation guarantees a certain level of quality. Courses that aren't accredited could have as easily been written by someone whose only ever read about the treatment you want to teach in a book, as someone with a degree level qualification and twenty years experience.
Image - at some point in your career someone will ask you where you trained, what sounds better, "I completed an accredited training course with xxxxx" or "I did a course £16.99 course I saw on Facebook", plus lots of pretty logos on your website look good.
How Do You Know if the Accreditation is Any Good?
Like everything in life not all accreditation is equal. There are lots of companies out there that will accredited courses for money whose accreditation isn't worth the paper it's typed on. There are a few names you can look out for though and know they are good, these include ABT and FHT who will meticulously check every page of every course and others like IPHM and ThinkTree who will vet the training provider and spot check their courses. These are all great options.
Inevitably though you will come across a course you really want to do which is accredited by some company you've never heard off, so how do you know if there accreditation is any good? Here's a few thinks to look out for:
- Can you get insurance for the course. A "real" accreditation company will either provide you with insurance themselves like ABT, who accredit and insure courses or, they will be able to tell you who will insure their courses. If they can't do this, they are not reputable. It is not unusual for a therapist to have multiple insurance policies as not all insurance companies will accept all kinds of accreditation.
- How is the course assessed? If no one ever watches you do the treatment, either face to face, online or on video it is not a reputable accreditation. How can you ever know you are doing it right if no one, who knows what you should be doing, has ever seen you do it.
- Do they look professional? This might sound really basic but you'd be surprised. Check out their website, if it isn't mobile enabled, I'd give it a wide berth. Does their logo look like clip art? If so, it's a no. Proper professional organisation do not have second rate websites and logos that wouldn't win third price in an under 5s art competition.
- Is it stupidly cheap? £16.99 to learn a complicated hands on treatment sounds to good to be true, because it is. It cost money for reputable accreditation and takes time and effort to create and teach good quality courses, we're not giving them away for less than entry to your local night club.