The San Francisco SPCA Academy For Dog Trainers
2500 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-4213 (415) 554-3095 Fax: (415) 554-3017 DogAcademy@sfspca.org
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Is Pet Dog Training the Career for You?
Whether you will be happy and successful in a career in pet dog training is not simply a
matter of your technical competence in dog training.
Pet dog training is a service occupation which often requires that you subordinate your own goals to those
of your clients, and interact primarily with dog guardians, rather than with the dogs themselves. Technical
competence as a trainer is, of course, required, but you apply these skills mostly by proxy through unskilled
people. And most professional opportunity in this field involves self employment, so entrepreneurial traits
of initiative and organization are crucial.
The Academy experience is designed to require many of the same attributes as actual work in the field,
within a sequence of structured experiences supported by faculty guidance. Taking a few minutes to do an
honest self-assessment based on the questions below will help you decide whether pet dog training is for
you. It will also give you an idea of whether the Academy experience is likely to be stimulating and fulfilling
or stressful and frustrating for you. The more of these you can genuinely answer with a “yes,” the better
this experience will be for you.
1. _______Will you be happy working in a field where many important questions have not yet been
answered, and where there are always multiple possible effective solutions to any specific problem?
a) Yes, no problem b) I think so c) I don’t think so d) Nope, can’t do it
2. _______Are you comfortable with a profession where your income is determined entirely by your
own efforts and has no guarantees?
a) Yes, no problem b) I think so c) I don’t think so d) Nope, can’t do it
3. _______Can you exist comfortably in a field that is currently unregulated? Although The Academy
offers a certificate