Commitment to Training

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Over our school holidays, my partner and I went away with a few friends on a cruise around the Pacific Islands.  One of the perks of working with Steiner is having the opportunity to talk with the beauty therapists, spa therapists, nail technicians and other beauty- and spa-related staff aboard the ship.

The majority of times I’ve been aboard cruise ships, many of the Steiner staff members aboard have been friendly, outgoing, confident: this time was no exception.

What impressed me the most was a young beauty therapist I spoke to from South Africa.  She’d graduated from her Diploma in Beauty Therapy at the end of 2009, gaining both ITEC and CIDESCO qualifications in the process.  The remarkable part about her story is that when she signed up for the course, she didn’t speak or understand English that much at all; her native language was Afrikaans.

Tuition in the course she was taking, however, was purely in English.  With studying ITEC and CIDESCO, she needed to be proficient in English in order to successfully gain her international qualifications.  See, she wanted these qualifications badly because, as we all know, in order to work on a cruise ship, you usually need one of these under your belt (ITEC, CIBTAC or CIDESCO), and her dream job was to work aboard a cruise ship.

So, during her course of study, she learned English.  She not only went headlong into studying a level 5 qualification (equivalent to the first year of a bachelor’s degree) but also did this with very little English.

She made it.  Not only did she graduate her own course with flying colours, but also gained both ITEC and CIDESCO qualifications (no mean feat in itself).

She’s working her dream job in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with the ability to see some of the most amazing islands and sights in the world along the way.  Sure, working aboard a cruise ship is hard work, but after learning a new language within a year and passing her examinations successfully, hard work is nothing to her.

(Before it’s brought up, her English was very good, and I was surprised she had only been speaking English for 16 months.)

In our positions, Jacqui and I hear (admittedly, not often) some prospective students (and even enrolled students) saying why they can’t do the course, or do some portion of it, or why this or that is preventing them from doing something or another, for sometimes, for what we feel are trivial reasons.

An example of this (not related to the school) was a man I once knew in the US.  He was married and had children (two of the three were teenagers at the time of this story).  In his life, he’d worked hard, provided for his family, but longed to be an architect as it was something that always interested him.

Two of his children, as I stated before, were teenagers living at home, one at university and one at high school.  Both offered to contribute the money from their jobs to help supplement the mother’s income to keep the household afloat while the father went back to university to study architecture.  It was a genuine, authentic, workable offer, but the father felt, as the breadwinner, he needed to stay in the industry he was in (which he had been in for many years prior) instead of taking the leap to do something he was passionate about.

To this day, he has never studied architecture, remaining in the same industry he’s always been in.

I think, as people, we place restrictions on what we feel we can or can’t do, and sometimes we play things extremely safe, convincing ourselves we can’t do something because some taught mantra inside of us is preventing us from doing it.  But there are those who decide to take a risk and go for things (responsibly, of course) because we uncondition ourselves and make the leap; the young lady I was talking about at the beginning of this piece was one of them.

The beauty therapy industry is an exciting industry feeling little to no impact from the economic downturn and its aftershocks.  Why not choose the National School of Aesthetics — the only provider in the South Island who can offer you ITEC and CIDESCO, qualifications you need if you want to travel — to get into this exciting industry?