According to the last Fitness Australia report (April 2012) the average ‘Fitness Professional’ (A phrase coined by a popular skills training company to label a personal trainer) will survive twelve months in the industry, if the PT is highly skilled they will make it to four years and if they survive the four year curse (like myself) they will make a career out of it.
According to Fit Aus,
the vast majority of PTs leave the industry citing two key points; irregular
hours and lack of job security. Just to give you the quick 101, the vast
majority of gyms and fitness facilities do not hire PT’s in the traditional
sense of the word, PTs are required to pay a ‘lease’ to the facility and then
build their own client base. This also includes acquiring professional
indemnity insurance. Essentially; this relieves the facility of both liability
should something go wrong (very possible given the current 12 week training
courses) and the financial risk of hiring and firing staff. However, the
inverse is true to the PT, who must accept a complete lack of job security and
an incredible amount of liability for one that is relatively unskilled and
uneducated.
Before you tune out
and move on the next article I would like to raise my concerns about industrial
relations and the fitness industry. You might have heard of this stupid thing
coming up called ‘the election’. Ok to be fair, we are very privileged to have
the rights to vote in this country so maybe I shouldn’t be too condescending.
Julia
Gillard announced a few weeks back that she plans to; enshrine penalty rates in law, meeting a key pre-election demand of her union
support base. This policy obviously covers issues of shift work loading and
overtime rates. Now this is obviously a body shot for small business in any
industry trying to operate in super-tough economic conditions that will be
forced to place more employees on subcontract or freelance agreements. But more-so this union lead policy will be
the clean right headshot to the fitness industry.
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| A Ranga with Glasses, Just like Gillard |
As such; If you ask
any small business operator what a politician can do to help their business,
they will almost certainly say ‘leave us alone’ the notion that Labor want to
increase the risk to employers is only going drive the fitness industry in to a
deeper, darker hole. In order for the fitness industry to move back to a
traditional model of employment, employers must be free to negotiate the terms
of employment that best suit their business. This will obviously include rates
of pay and terms of employment
Under Labors latest plans the fitness industry
is robbed of any chance it has of fighting back to the moral high ground. As
such; the number of inexperienced, unsupervised and uneducated personal
trainers is going to continue to spiral out of control.
