You’ve thought long and hard about what you want to do with your life and how you want to earn money to live. After evaluating all of your different options in association with who you are and what you want out of life, you’ve landed on the decision that you want to become a massage therapist.
Congratulations! It’s great to know exactly what you want to do and to have a path forward / a direction to go!
Now, however, you need to choose which massage therapy school you are going to apply for in order to start training to become a massage therapist.
People have all sorts of questions they need answered before they take the leap into training for a new career. Below are a few important questions to ask before you make the important decision about what massage training school is likely going to be best for you.
Massage Class Scheduling
Do you have children to care for?
Do you have a job you have to continue working while you are taking massage school classes?
Are you someone who has trouble getting up early in the morning and can only feel confident in achieving perfect attendance if you don’t have to take early morning classes?
If any of these thoughts above concern you or if you have other reasons why you may require flexibility in scheduling for massage training, then you need to find out if the school you are considering offers classes during a variety of different hours and if there are any massage courses that you will have to take prior to graduation that will be less flexible in scheduling than others.
Financial Options
Just because you want to take classes to change your career doesn’t mean you have the extra money set aside to do so, right?
You may need to ask if there is financial aid available, if there are payment plans available, and equally as important, you need to know how much you are going to have to spend overall so you don’t end up with debt you cannot afford to pay off, even with a potential earning increase from becoming a massage therapist. Don’t forget to ask about the financial side of things when you are excitedly embarking on a huge lifestyle change and signing up for school to become a massage therapist!
Time
You need to know how much time it is going to take for you to complete your massage therapy training program.
Never walk into any commitment without a good idea of how long you can expect to be taking classes for before you can begin working.
You’ll want to know how long each individual course is going to take, if there are any variances as to how long it will take or if it takes the same amount of time for every student, and how long it will take for you to complete all of your training and coursework.
One good question as part of that bigger question is to ask your enrollment counselor just how long the average student takes to complete the full program and each course within.
Hands-On Training
Massage therapy is physical work.
Ask the school if you will be working directly on real people while you are in school and if they will all be students or not. Ask them about the process between doing massages in class verses moving into any additional live massage therapy sessions with people who may be clients of the school. How much do you need to learn before you start working on people who come to the school for more affordable massage therapy sessions?
Is Massage Therapy the Only Thing Taught?
You want to find out just how specialized the massage training school you will be attending actually is.
If the school you are going to teaches massage therapy and only everything entailed within massage therapy training, then you have a good idea these folks care a lot about the field of massage therapy and the passion of touch.
If massage therapy is only one of many different courses they teach and you will be attending the school along with people who are going there to be carpenters and mechanics and accountants for example, you know the school does not then have a primary focus on the specialization of massage therapy.