FAQ re Instructor Training Courses

Yes, absolutely, if you really need to.  If you are also choosing to do the assessments you’ll need to do the Level 1 assessment before the Level 2 assessment, but otherwise, yep, knock yourself out! If you are wanting to do both assessments we will do our best to schedule them for consecutive days for you. 

You will need to complete all the online lessons before taking the practical assessment.  If you wanted to put your head down and plough through all the online lessons as fast as possible, you could complete the Level 1 or Level 2 course in just a day or two. However, assessments can take a while to organise as we need several people to be ready for an assessment in order to run one, so we can’t guarantee that we will be able to get you an assessment immediately.  Realistically, one should probably allow at least a month from starting the course to taking the practical assessment.  Or go down the online-assessment route.

The courses are not NQZA recognised. The costs and administrative hassle to  bring courses into the NZQA system are extremely high, and it wouldn’t actually make any difference overall anyway. There is no legal requirement to have an NZQA-recognised SUP Instructor qualification to operate as a SUP instructor in NZ.  However, if you operate as an instructor and something goes wrong because you’re lacking the appropriate knowledge, then you’d be negligent, and prosecutions would surely follow.

Our instructor courses are designed to give people the knowledge they need, and give a framework for delivering lessons based on what is considered best practice.  So it’s not structured or marked like an NZQA qualification, etc, it’s meant more to be a resource and foundation.

A certificate acknowledging that you have completed the training package is issued once you have worked through all the modules and completed the online final assessment test.  

There are myriad different SUP instructor qualifications out there,  and unfortunately there is no standardisation or comparative system between them. 

From our own experience of other qualifications, along with the feedback we’ve had from people who have done other courses first then done one of our training packages, we feel confident that ours are more  comprehensive than most other qualifications, particularly on the procedural side of things.  Very few courses offer practical paddleboard skills training as part of the deal. Some courses include other skills such as powerboat driving, even jetski rescues, and of course some overseas courses have to operate in a different local legislative environment, which can change things slightly. However, in general we feel confident in saying that this training package will set you up well to become a SUP instructor, and the skills you learn here will be transferrable to pretty much any other location. 

 What tends to happen when someone who has learned their skills from one of our courses  goes overseas and applies to work at a SUP school, they usually just get asked what their training covered. An employer can tell very quickly whether someone is competent! They then may have to do some local training to get up to speed if there are specific laws/processes in that location.   

You should probably ask the question the other way around; how come instructor courses are usually so expensive! Normally because they’re from profit-making organisations, and/or a lot of ticket-clipping is occurring from the international organisation behind the courses. 

Our view is that it should be as affordable as possible to get proper training on how to teach SUP properly and safely. We’d offer the courses for free if we could, but an online learning platform like this has a lot of overheads and annual costs that we have to pay for somehow. But hopefully you will agree that the fees we charge are extremely reasonable in return for 10-12 hours of online learning education that you can revisit and retake as many times as you want. 

If you are already a qualified SUP instructor then we have put together some conversion packages which will get you up to speed with the NZ legislative environment for SUP, and the NZ way of doing things – important if you intend to work at an existing NZ SUP school or business. Contact us to find out more.

This is true, quite a lot of other organisations insist on seeing a logbook (or similar) showing that you have completed a number of lessons at a school as a trainee/apprentice  instructor, before they will issue your full qualifications. There is merit in this, but it’s also completely open to fraud. It also fails completely if there isn’t a SUP school in your area where you can do your trainee sessions!  

Our instructor courses are about equipping the person with the knowledge they need. Nobody becomes a perfect instructor the day they qualify. It’s just the start of the journey.  The difference between our online courses and most others is that you can come back to all the information here any time after you’ve passed.  It’s not just a few pages of written notes stuffed in a drawer. 

This can be arranged, contact us to discuss what you need.

You don’t pay for the practical assessment until you’re ready to take it.  If you decide not to take the practical assessment, you cannot request a refund on the online learning section of the course. 

If, after booking and paying for the practical assessment, you choose not to take it, refunds will depend on the circumstances. If you pulling out of the practical assessment means having to cancel it for others because now there are not enough people to make it happen, then there will be no refund. If someone else can take your place, a refund will be no problem.