How to become a fitness club administrator? Increasingly, people who want to be involved in the fitness industry are interested in questions related to the difference between the job of a fitness club administrator and the job of an administrator in any other industry. Of course, there are some general provisions of labor legislation that summarize and reduce the functions of a specialist to a very specific list of rights and obligations, but in each individual case, the path to the profession is often completely different. In this article, we will talk about what path the future administrator of the fitness club should take.
How to become a fitness club administrator
With the goal of finding a job as a fitness club administrator, it is quite logical to, first of all, go to the job search site and start collecting information regarding the vacancy you are interested in. There can be 10, 50, or 100 such vacancies within one city, and even more, depending on the size of the city, how much the industry is developed in it and how high the demand for specialists is. Having opened literally the first five to ten ads, you can already get a general impression of the requirements for the applicant. To say that all of them are unambiguously extremely important and necessary is not entirely correct. By and large, they can be divided into desirable, necessary, and obligatory. They will be discussed further.
This article is the fourth in a series about the activities of a fitness club administrator. In addition to this one, I also recommend you familiarize yourself with the articles “Who is an administrator of the fitness club“, “Job description of an administrator” and “The profession of a fitness club administrator“.
Requirements for candidates
- Desirable requirements. Asking yourself how to become an administrator of a fitness club and analyzing open vacancies on the Internet, you can meet such stereotyped requirements as literacy, punctuality, tact, organization, benevolence, decency, ability and desire to work, and so on. Without belittling the importance of all these skills, it is still worth saying that these are rather vague concepts, indicating which in the resume, you still will not make any impression on the employer. Whether you have a desire to work or not, it will be possible to test only in practice, just like all the other listed qualities and skills.
- Necessary requirements. In addition to general concepts, under which most of the applicants already fall, there are certainly more specific ones, such as knowledge of customer accounting programs, MS Word, Excel, CRM, the ability to work with office equipment, such as a printer, scanner or fax. There may also be requirements for the knowledge of one or more foreign languages. These more specific requirements already somewhat narrow the range of candidates, since, for example, you might not have had a need to use office equipment or office programs earlier. But knowledge of a foreign language is increasingly becoming a prerequisite for hiring.
- Mandatory requirements. In fact, the most really tough requirements for a person who wants to become an administrator of a fitness club are: experience in a similar position and the presence of higher or at least secondary specialized education. The first indicator tells the employer that you have work experience, have communication skills, and are good at selling. The second shows that you are a socially adapted person who can read, write and communicate competently. No more and no less.
Work experience as an administrator
The best help to become a fitness club administrator is to have experience in a similar position. Moreover, it really can be literally any job in which your main tasks were communicating with customers and selling goods or services. Such experience gives an advantage in the sense that you already understand how communication with clients is structured, what they usually ask first of all, what arguments they give, what objections you have to face, and more. With experience, you also understand how sales work, how to describe your product, how to properly present its benefits, how to identify a customer’s need, and how you can meet this need in the most optimal and beneficial way for him.
Experience in exercising
An equally important help in striving to become an administrator of a fitness club will be the experience of independent training, whether it be a gym, group classes, aqua fitness, or martial arts. And the point here is not so much about the level of physical fitness, but about the fact that while visiting a fitness club, you can simultaneously follow how it works, how the staff work, how the training process is going on in different zones of the club, what simulators it has, for what purposes they are intended and how exercises are performed on them. You can study the club by observing what types of services it provides, how many trainers work in the club, what is their experience and what classes they lead, how many administrators work at the reception and how their shifts are arranged, and so on.
How to acquire knowledge
So, let’s say you have experience in communicating with people and experience in sales. You already have an idea of how a typical fitness club works. In fact, you could already submit your resume and expect to be invited for an interview. However, in order to increase your chances for success, you have decided to back up your skills and abilities with relevant, highly specialized knowledge. How can this be done? There are two possibilities here. The first is to learn from a person who already works or has recently become an administrator of a fitness club, the second is to take appropriate training courses.
- First option. If among your acquaintances there is a person who has already been working as an administrator of a fitness club for at least a year, consider that you have an incredible opportunity to get acquainted with the whole underside of this profession. From this person, you can get comprehensive information about how the administrator’s duties are performed, how work with potential and current clients is organized, how work is done with a computer, on the phone, and via the Internet. How do administrators interact with trainers, managers, directors, and owners. Who is in charge of purchasing, shipping, advertising, and so on.
- Second option. In terms of acquiring knowledge, it is more preferable, because, at the end of the training courses, you receive an appropriate document confirming your qualifications. At the interview, you may simply not believe that your acquaintance taught you, and no one will call him and check it. Ultimately, it remains unknown to the employer to what extent the skill level of the person who taught you meets the requirements of the industry. Completing training courses gives you a much better chance of becoming a fitness club administrator since your level of qualifications is confirmed by the specific official document.
Conclusion
So, if you are wondering how to become a fitness club administrator, you should keep the following in mind. Firstly, there are no strict requirements for this position, which is often confirmed by the column “We consider candidates without work experience” in the vacancy description. Secondly, training in this profession, both with an experienced employee and in training courses, takes no more than 1 month, which makes it possible to quickly master the basic theoretical set of knowledge. In some cases, you may be required to know English or another foreign language, knowledge of specialized accounting and reporting programs may be required, but as a rule, the former may not be needed at all, and the latter can be quickly learned already in the process. In the end, remember that no matter what qualities you have, if you were hired, then you were given a chance and how you show yourself now depends only on you.
Felix Palmer – author of the blog crusfit.com
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