Pet Career Weekly - for future dog trainers
Can you make a living training dogs?
Every week, one free email with honest answers about working as a dog trainer: what shapes the pay, how people get in, and what the job is really like.
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What lands in your inbox
The honest answer on pay
What really shapes a trainer's income, and how to increase it.
What the job is really like
The skills, the first steps, and why you don't need a four-year degree to start.
How people really get in
The days, the clients, and the parts nobody puts in the brochure.
One real piece of the craft
A skill, a busted myth, or a new way of reading the next dog you meet.
The questions future trainers are asking
01
Can you actually make a living training dogs?
02
How do people become dog trainers, and how long does it take?
03
What does a dog trainer do all day? (Hint: a lot of it is coaching people.)
04
I already walk dogs or volunteer at a shelter. Is that a real starting point?
05
What do good trainers try first when a dog has a problem?
06
Is it too late to switch careers and work with dogs?
From a recent issue…
The big dog is not losing. It is keeping the game going
A big confident dog drops to the floor in front of a small nervous one and lets itself be climbed on. It reads as the small dog winning. It is closer to the opposite: the big dog has made itself less frightening on purpose, because a partner who is scared stops playing, and the game ending is the thing it is trying to avoid.
Trainers call this self-handicapping, and once you can see it you cannot stop seeing it. The signals are small and they are deliberate:
The play bow, front end down, back end up, the one everybody already knows.
A raised paw, wrist loose and bent, held in mid-air.
A shoulder roll, one front leg tucked so the shoulder meets the ground.
A turned back, which is the big one, because it hands the other dog the safe end.
That is the part of this work people underestimate before they try it: most of it is watching closely enough to tell two nearly identical things apart.
Read the full storyWritten for people who can't stop watching dogs
Dog walkers and sitters who are good at it and wonder what's next.
Shelter volunteers who always seem to get handed the hard dogs.
Proud dog owners who trained their own dog and caught the bug.
Career changers who want work that feels like it matters, at any age.
Brought to you by The Academy of Pet Careers
Pet Career Weekly comes from The Academy of Pet Careers, a pet career trade school that has been teaching people to work with animals since 1993. From our campus in St. Charles, Missouri, and online, we teach dog training, dog grooming and veterinary assisting to students from across the country. Everything we teach starts from Pet Empowerment, our force-free, science-based approach to how animals learn and feel. This newsletter shares what we've learned along the way, free, with anyone curious about a career with dogs.
Become a Dog Trainer
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Explore Dog GroomingBecome a Vet Assistant
An in-person program of about five months, taught by a Registered Veterinary Technician.
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