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Training Stage

Pet grooming requires extensive training. You can expect to keep learning the finer details of grooming for many years. Even when you know how to groom you will benefit from learning productivity to groom smarter and easier and to produce the same work in less time with sacrificing quality. The most popular sources of training for entry-level career seekers are:

• Apprenticeships

• Schools (some with partial online studies too)

• Home Study

Apprenticeships

Finding a pet grooming business owner willing to accept you as an apprentice is possible but not overly common. All too often in this industry business owners have quickly lost groomers they trained after the apprentice had become competent enough to start their own business. It can be a significant loss to the owner who invested time and money in your training, and there have been so many such incidents that a lot of owners have sampled the sour taste of these experiences and shared their stories with other owners. However, you will apprenticeships being offered in our Free Help Wanted Classified Ads at PetGroomer.com. It’s not a lost cause.

We do hope that you will honor the education provided by your owner-employer-educator and provide them with more extended loyalty and plenty of notice when you do intend to depart their employment. Further don’t the follow experience of others who open up a competitor business down the block. Yes, that does happen and this tactic rarely works in the long run.

How long will an apprenticeship last? That’s hard to answer here. It really depends upon the amount and extent of the training being provided and how quickly you progress from lesson to lesson. As a general rule of thumb we would suggest at least one year and perhaps longer before you would consider yourself as having moved past the apprentice stage. Apprenticeship training isn’t necessarily as quick and intensive as going to a school and being given a broad encompassing education on a strict schedule. As an apprentice you may work as a pet bather for weeks and slowly learn the skills of a full-charge groomer. However, you are getting plenty of hands-on experience and that is fantastic. Keep in mind the graduate of a grooming school still has months of post-graduate experience to become a highly-productive, well-skilled experienced groomer similar to the apprenticeship route.

Let’s take a moment aside here and we will explain why we are providing you with such a weak answer on how long you must apprentice. The odds of providing you with a clear answer would be in our favor if pet grooming was a vocationally licensed profession wherein the standards of education were stated in the licensing legislation, but that hasn’t happened yet. So every pet grooming business owner creates their own apprenticeship program, and they are all different to some degree. So we can only speak in general terms. Finally, your education as an apprentice can never be greater than the degree of achievement of the business owner acting as your teacher.

Schools

Attending a reputable school or institute of pet grooming is our best advice for training. There are significant resources at PetGroomer.com to help you locate and select a school including the international School Directory within the PetGroomer.com Buyer's Guide. However we are going to fall back on the problem mentioned above relating to the lack of commonly accepted educational standards adopted by the pet grooming industry. You are going to find significant variations in school curriculums and the length of their curriculums. That means you have plenty of homework to do before you enroll in any school of grooming. PetGroomer.com does its best to give you the information you need to make a more informed decision in selecting a grooming education that meets your career goals.

Do we have some opinions? Yes. Some schools offer perfectly fine 200 to 300 hour programs but we do prefer 500 or more hours for serious groomers. Don't expect to be a “full-charge” pet groomer after any beginning school course. If you hear that, it is probably a sales pitch! Never approach an employer after your graduate from school with the attitude or bold statement that you are a full-charge pet groomer. Most business owners will refute it, post haste. Could you possibly be hired in the role of full-charge pet groomer after graduation? Yes, it does happen. In general, retail stores and veterinarians adding pet grooming departments to their businesses will often consider hiring a graduate who has successfully completed an extensive and professional vocational school program. Again, the more curriculum hours you complete the more experience you have to market, and when it comes to experience, more is usually better in pet grooming.

After graduation you will need plenty of additional experience. This does not mean that you cannot become self-employed and go for it. But if you envision becoming a highly-skilled pet groomer and perhaps gaining optional certification as such, you need a great deal more experience. In general, the average graduate without one year of additional full-time experience is an advanced beginner to most master pet trimmers and business owners. Certified "master" groomers often take several additional workshops in preparation for certification testing and have thousands of hours of experience. In fact, our opinion is that every groomer should look to continuing education throughout their career.

To support your performance after your training period concludes, take detailed notes during your training. Organize them carefully. Never overlook building a great reference library of books and videos on pet grooming. You need books with illustrated grooming styling information on generally all AKC recognized breeds, and perhaps more. Sometimes groomers have to look at pictures of a well-groomed pet and emulate it where they are not experienced on a particular breed.

Very few schools invest significant time and money in preparing a proprietary textbook or a complete professional collection of "course handouts" for their students. Most vocational schools of pet grooming have a library facility. In 1996 Stephen, the PetGroomer.com Webmaster and Maddie Ogle, PhD wrote 48 proprietary course handouts for a school of pet grooming, and even these were to be supplemented with additional pet grooming books. The task took months. Perhaps that explains why some schools offer little in the way of proprietary course handouts. Students really need them! Remember, as a student and consumer selecting the best school for your training needs, you are responsible to ask what written support materials are included in your tuition.

You will certainly refer to them once you are out in the business world. If you have few or no how-to grooming books and videos get to our bookstore today! Here’s more good news. In the last two years revised and updated, and entirely new how-to grooming books, have come on the market. They are excellent! It’s vital that you acquire them for your library and we’ve made it easy. The PetGroomer.com Bookstore has our recommendations and they are reviewed in the Library Reading Room at PetGroomer.com.

Recently new advancements have been made in marrying both online and onsite hands-on grooming training into one program. The Nash Academy of Kentucky and New Jersey lead in this development. You can choose to complete classroom portions of their school curriculum online and then attend their school locations or an authorized grooming business location to complete the hands-on portion of your program. The latter is referred to as an “externship.” If you want to reduce the time away from home to attend a school out of your area this type of program is worthy of serious consideration.

Home Study

There are several home study opportunities to satisfy your pet grooming training objectives. Some are online only, some are home correspondence only, some include videos and tests and some include it all. Like all other training programs you need to do some homework to find the one best for you.

Perhaps the best attribute that all groomers can agree on is that home study is a great first step to help you decide if pet grooming is right for you. If you want to go further be sure to take the most complete course. Some home study providers make themselves available by telephone so that you can ask questions as you learn because unlike a school or apprenticeship you don’t have an instructor onsite with you. Of course you will need to locate pets to groom and they will assist you with sources for these pets.

Many groomers have shared with us their satisfaction having started with home study. Like apprenticeships and schooling you need to realize the same thing, you will need plenty of additional experience following graduation, and you should seek continuing education for the first several years of your career. PetGroomer.com has sources for several home study programs for your consideration.

We're not done yet, let's go onto the second part of staging a pet grooming career on the next page.