Here at Promote Training HQ we’ve been keen onlookers to the subject of golf club management training for a number of years. It’s a training provision that’s seen some significant changes over the last couple of decades or so. Indeed, back in the mid-1990’s if you were looking for golf club management training, you’d have very little choice indeed.

The Association of Golf Club Secretaries, now called the Golf Club Managers’ Association, staged a very popular one-week residential course entitled “Introduction to Golf Club Management”. To this day, this golf club management training course still exists and is a popular choice for people looking to enter the industry for the first time.

The Golf Clubs Advisory Association also staged golf club management training courses on a residential basis over 3-days – if memory serves me correctly usually with the specular backdrop of the Lakes District. Whilst the association still exists, it’s specific golf club management training courses have long since ceased.

Less well known at the time was the correspondence course entitled “Duties of a Golf Club Secretary”, which was offered by a company called Club Management Services, based in Belper, Derbyshire. They also offered a “Duties of a Golf Club Steward” in their two-course repertoire. It was, until we popped up, the only golf club management training course ever offered exclusively by distance learning. Alas, it too has long since hit the training graveyard.

It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that Universities and Colleges started to create diploma and degree based qualifications in generic sport/leisure management, but with a heavy nuance towards golf club management training. One of the first was Merrist Wood College near Guildford in Surrey. Others included Myerscough College, the University of Lincoln, Bournemouth University and the University of Central Lancashire.

This was certainly a seismic shift in the golf club management training provision in the UK. For the first time, accredited qualifications could be undertaken on the subject. Unfortunately, such qualifications were often lambasted alongside other allegedly less “academic” subjects such as media studies. I seem to recall reading one article about the demise of University education that mentioned it in the same breath as the newly created degree in surfing. No word of a lie – a degree in surfing!

Around 2007/08 the Golf Club Managers Association joined forced with Bucks New University in Wycombe to offer the Certificate in Golf Club Management. This new qualification was largely born from the Universities own popular Sports Management and Golf Studies degree and headed up by the former Professional Golfer turned academic and senior lecturer, Andrew Rankin. Last year saw the last intake of students onto this course with plans to introduce a new offering in conjunction with the Golf Club Managers Association, the PGA and BIGGA (British & International Golf Greenkeepers Association).

In the last six or so years, the Club Managers Association of America has travelled across the Atlantic ocean and established the Club Managers Association of Europe. They offer a Management Development Programme consisting of a number of courses and learning opportunities delivered face-to-face during residential training sessions. An important distinction is that they are very much ‘pitching’ in the wider club industry – not just golf clubs.

And then there’s the newest entrant to the golf club management training arena – us. We believe that the combination of practical topics, real-life case studies/examples and the eLearning delivery format makes Promote Training’s courses different, and at the same time complementary, to what’s already in the market.

What is for sure is that golf club management training has many more educational opportunities than it did 20 or so years ago and that can only be great news for the industry.