1. How to start?
Basically it is all about your priorities. Once you are sure the snowsport job is the right way to go further, set up your checklist what you have and what you need to reach your goal. You probably save bunch of time applying for jobs that do not suite to what you really want. Example of checking priorities can be the wished country, your language expectations, personal progress, spare time for training or internal education, length of ski season or the school type.
2. You find the school. What next?
When applying for a snowsport job, you might experience quite a different talks and interviews. It differs a lot from country to country. We recommend you to prepare yourself for such a meetings and get a bit around the google first. Each culture has its specifics and once in Italy, if you have never passed the giant slalom course, you are outsider right away. In France do not try to speak in English. Such awareness gets you through the first filtering.
3. I am ready. How to get in touch?
Best way is to prepare some document that you can pass to school managers. Mention all your experiences, language skills, educations and qualifications, and do not forget about your previous jobs or references. These all criteria are in our standardised forms on Snowsportjobs.com. What is being ranked the most in recent years are good experiences and reliability of the person. Once you are skilled in technics and you provide the good motivation for the job, many schools are open to invest some overtime to teach you missing knowledge.
4. Don´t Do´s!
First of all, do not lie. If not earlier, at the first day of training or by the first day with client, experienced school managers know quite fast what is going on. Don´t think you are indispensable. School always prioritise the client needs than your lies or your inaccurate behaviour. Don´t behave you are the best skier in the world. Both clients and school team have their own style and it is expected you manage to flow with them. You work with people, you must get along with people.
5. How to talk about wage?
Ski schools have usually quite strict salary models to fit you in. There is not much place for bargaining. Once in Austria you will mostly find the fixed salaries per month, in Switzerland you get mainly paid per hour. As we described in our other article, try to +/- what will you have in the end of the month. And do not forget that skiing has many more advantages than just to have 1 EUR higher wage to be satisfied. Ski instructors is life style, community, passion for mountains, snow and working with people. That is also what school managers with expect from you.
