How to Become a Dog Trainer: Why There Is No Perfect Route

If you are searching for how to become a dog trainer, the slightly frustrating answer is that there is no single route that turns you into a good one.

You can go to university. You can take online courses. You can assist at training classes, volunteer in rescue, find a mentor, take up a dog sport, attend seminars or simply spend years training dogs. All of those routes can teach you useful things, and every one of them has weaknesses.

I think that is where the conversation about becoming a dog trainer often goes wrong. We look for the qualification, course or organisation that will give us permission to use the title, when the much harder question is whether we are actually developing all the skills the job requires.

For me, a good dog trainer needs a strong understanding of the science and theory, good practical training skills, experience across different dogs, and enough feedback to know whether what they are doing is actually working. You also need to be able to teach humans and manage clients, and if you want to make a living from it you need some understanding of business too. Those last two are massive subjects in their own right, so I will deal with them separately rather than pretending I can squeeze them into this article.

This one is about learning to actually train dogs.

The short answer

If you want the short version, build your understanding of the science, train dogs regularly, work with dogs that are not your own, get feedback from people who are better than you, and deliberately seek out the experience your current route is missing.

There is no perfect route. The trick is recognising the weaknesses in the route you have chosen and doing something about them.

After more than twenty years doing this, and a large chunk of that time teaching other people how to do it, my view of the best way to learn has changed a fair bit.

My route into dog training was hardly a masterplan

I did not sit down one day, research the perfect pathway and follow it. I got a Cane Corso that was completely out of my league.

I have written about him before because that dog changed the direction of my life, but essentially I realised very quickly that I needed to learn more. I started helping out and assisting at local dog training classes, did some workshops, moved to a different club and eventually completed an instructor course through them. It was fairly basic, but it got me started.

Eventually I started teaching classes myself. They were £2 a head and I had to drive more than an hour to get there. I did that for about two years. I was so committed to getting the experience that I eventually moved closer to the club.

Then I went out on my own.

I was nowhere near as ready as I thought I was.

Over time I had other trainers working with me, ran classes from several locations and ended up with four instructors underneath me. I later moved to Spain, started classes in different areas and opened a dog training and behaviour centre. From there I began teaching instructors myself.

Eventually I lectured full time for the IMDT and was later invited to deliver seminars for Victoria Stilwell, the APDT and other organisations. Then I built the School of Canine Science.

Somewhere along the way, Dean turned up on one of our Force Free Trick Trainer courses. More on that later.

There was no clean progression from beginner to qualified professional. There were courses, mentors, thousands of dogs, mistakes, seminars, sport, clients, reading, teaching and a lot of hours spent realising that something I had previously been certain about was considerably more complicated than I thought.

The first problem I found with teaching dog trainers

When I started teaching trainers, one of the formats I believed in was the one or two-day seminar. It made sense.

Get everybody into a room, teach a subject intensively and send them home with more knowledge than they arrived with.

The problem became obvious fairly quickly. I could have someone sitting in the room whose first ever day in dog training was that seminar. Sitting two seats away could be somebody who had been training dogs for twenty years, occasionally longer than I had.

Now try teaching both of those people something genuinely useful over one or two days.

If you spend half the seminar explaining basic learning theory properly, the experienced trainer is bored out of their mind. If you go straight into the complicated stuff, the beginner has no foundation to hang any of it on and probably feels overwhelmed.

Then there is simply the amount of information you can deliver.

Some subjects cannot be taught properly in six hours without leaving most of the interesting bits out. That was one of the reasons online education became so exciting for us.

Online education solved one problem and created another

When we moved more heavily into online education, Dean and I suddenly had something we never had in a seminar room.

Time.

We could take a subject and go into ridiculous depth. Students could stop, rewind, revisit something six months later and follow references without us trying to cram an entire field of science into a Saturday afternoon.

For teaching theory and underpinning science, online education is fucking brilliant. There are also obvious accessibility benefits. You do not need to fly across the country, take three days off work or somehow remember everything somebody said at 4:45pm after listening to them talk since nine in the morning.

But online learning loses things too.

You lose some of the community. Some of my best learning came from simply hanging around more experienced trainers who happened to be on the same two-day seminar. You lose those conversations over lunch and the little bits of information that were never part of the official teaching.

You also lose some of the nuance that happens when an instructor watches what you are actually doing rather than what you think you are doing.

Most importantly, nobody can make you pick up the lead.

I have watched this happen for years.

People love learning about dog training. They will watch webinars, read papers, buy courses, listen to podcasts and happily discuss the finer points of reinforcement schedules on Facebook.

Then you give them a practical training exercise and suddenly life gets in the way.

We see it in High Performers. There are loads of practical dog training exercises available, but consuming information is much easier than going outside and doing the repetitions.

There is an excuse I have heard, and used myself. If you are a painter and you have spent all day painting other people's houses, the last thing you want to do when you get home is paint your own.

I understand it.

Unfortunately, your own dog and your own practical ability are also two of the biggest adverts you have. They don't have to be perfect. But if you're not willing to put the time in, do you really think it's any easier for your clients?

Knowing more about dog training does not automatically mean you are becoming better at training dogs.

Dog training theory is not the same as practical skill

I have met extremely well-qualified, highly academic and deservedly respected people in this industry who understand the theory at a level most trainers will never reach.

Some of them cannot practically train a dog particularly well.

I have also met people at the other end who can train the arse off almost any dog you put in front of them, but ask them to explain the science behind what they are doing and you realise fairly quickly that they do not know their arsehole from their elbow.

Neither is where I want to be.

The trainers I have respected the most throughout my career tend to have both.

They can train and they understand why the training works.

That second part is important because eventually something stops working. The dog does something you did not expect. The reinforcer you assumed would be powerful suddenly has no value. The environment changes. The emotional state changes. The owner cannot physically carry out the technique you normally use.

If all you know is the recipe, you are fucked when one of the ingredients disappears.

Understanding the underlying science gives you the ability to adapt. Practical experience gives you the skill to actually execute the new plan.

You need both.

Training your own dog does not make you a dog trainer

There is an old saying I have used for years: just because a woman has a vagina doesn't make her a gynaecologist.

Having a dog does not make you a dog trainer either. Even training one dog to an extremely high standard only tells us so much.

Your dog has a particular body, reinforcement history, temperament, genetics, learning history and relationship with you. Over time you become exceptionally good at predicting that individual.

Then somebody hands you a different dog.

You have spent years working German Shepherd-sized dogs and suddenly there is a pug staring up at you from somewhere around your ankles. Your handling mechanics have to change.

You meet a Malinois and assume toys are going to be your easy route into reinforcement because every Malinois you have worked previously would sell its grandmother for a tug.

This one is too stressed in the environment to play.

Now what?

That variation is where a lot of professional competence comes from. Working your own dog can give you depth. Working many unfamiliar dogs gives you breadth.

If you want to become a professional dog trainer, at some stage you need both.

Should aspiring dog trainers do a dog sport?

I think they should seriously consider it.

You do not have to become a world champion, and you do not even have to compete.

Putting yourself onto a competition field is a hell of a learning experience because suddenly somebody else decides whether your training met the criteria, but competition itself is not essential.

What I strongly recommend is finding some way of training towards objective criteria.

Sport is one of the best ways I have found to do that.

Pet dog training can be quite forgiving. The criteria change constantly because the owner's goals change. The dog walks reasonably well now, so that might be enough. The recall works most of the time. The sit is good enough.

There is nothing wrong with that. The goal of pet training is generally to make life better, not win half a point because a dog's arse was slightly crooked.

But sport forces you into depth.

You drill behaviours hundreds or thousands of times. You learn reinforcement placement, timing, mechanics, progressive difficulty and how quickly apparently tiny errors become large ones after enough repetitions.

You fail. You get feedback. You change something and try again.

Because you are working towards very specific goals with one dog over a long period, you get to see the consequences of your training decisions in a way you rarely do when you see a pet client for six sessions.

Why I picked Mondioring

Different sports teach different things.

I spent a lot of time around Mondioring because one of its biggest strengths for me was proofing.

If I teach a sit to a pet dog, I do not particularly care whether the sit is perfectly straight or whether the dog's front feet moved three centimetres.

I care whether the dog can sit when life is happening.

Can the dog maintain the behaviour when I disappear from view? Can they do it around noise? Can they do it when somebody is offering them food? Can they do it when some bloke dressed as a clown is running around the field doing something ridiculous?

Mondioring deliberately creates that kind of difficulty.

That transfers brilliantly to pet dog training because pet owners do not need beautiful behaviours in empty training halls. They need behaviours that survive when the world becomes a pain in the arse.

There is even a Spanish discipline called ODM, Obediencia de Mondioring, that isolates much of that obedience and proofing work. We actually have a mini-course on it inside High Performers because I think the principles transfer so well.

That does not mean Mondioring is the answer to becoming a dog trainer. It was one of the things that gave me something I needed.

Your route may be completely different.

Why dog trainers need experience with different dogs

Sport can give tremendous depth because you spend so much time hyper-focusing on one dog.

A rescue centre can give you almost the opposite experience. Work 40 unfamiliar dogs in a month and you are constantly being forced to change.

Different motivations. Different emotional states. Different histories. Different bodies. Different levels of experience around humans. Different responses to restraint, movement, food, toys, novelty and the environment.

That develops adaptability very quickly.

Neither experience replaces the other.

Someone who has only worked hundreds of rescue dogs may never have taken one behaviour through the ridiculous depth required in high-level sport.

Someone who has spent ten years producing beautiful performances with one or two dogs may get an unpleasant surprise when handed a frightened rescue dog who does not care about any of the things that normally make their training look brilliant.

That is why I do not believe there is a perfect route.

The useful question is: what is my current route failing to teach me?

Then go and find that experience.

Look carefully at the people teaching you

This matters more than whichever logo is on the certificate.

If somebody is teaching you the science of behaviour and they are a brilliant academic researcher, I do not need them to have a Mondioring trophy on the shelf.

I am there for their science.

But if somebody is positioning themselves as an expert in practical dog training, I think it is reasonable to ask where the practical dog training is.

Do you see them working dogs?

Do they demonstrate in front of students?

Do they show sessions that do not go perfectly?

Can you see evidence of the skill they are selling you?

Sport titles are not mandatory. Plenty of phenomenal trainers do not compete.

At the same time, presenting yourself as some kind of sports-dog authority when you have repeatedly failed at every sport you have attempted should probably raise an eyebrow.

Do not simply look at somebody's certificates.

Look at what they actually do.

Repetitions are not enough either

There is another problem with telling people to simply go and practise.

You can practise something badly. A lot.

Five hundred repetitions do not automatically make you good if you have spent all five hundred rehearsing the same mistake.

This is where supervised practical feedback becomes incredibly important.

Someone needs to tell you when your timing could be better, when your reinforcement placement is producing something you did not intend, when your criteria jumped too quickly or when you completely misread what the dog was doing.

But good coaching should not just be somebody standing behind you waiting to tell you everything you fucked up.

You also need to know what you did well.

If your timing was excellent there, you need that reinforced too. If you made a brilliant decision to change your plan because you noticed something subtle in the dog, somebody should point that out so you understand what you did and can repeat it.

Dog trainers are often brilliant at this when watching somebody else. We can sit on the side of a training field and immediately see what the other trainer should change.

Then we pick up our own lead and suddenly we are standing right in the middle of the problem.

We are too close to it.

That second skilled pair of eyes can be incredibly valuable regardless of how experienced you are.

CPD should make you better, not just give you points

Most good established trainers already understand the importance of continuing professional development.

My problem is that CPD can become another certificate-collecting exercise.

How many points does this give me? Does this keep my membership current? Can I post a picture showing everyone that I attended a seminar with this person? Does this count towards my next accreditation?

Don't even get me started on accreditation and regulation again. I've already done that to death in What Does “Accredited” Actually Mean in Dog Training? and Following the Paperwork: David Montgomery's Regulation Blog Doesn't Add Up.

Those things may have administrative value, but I think we sometimes forget the actual purpose of continuing professional development.

What can I do better now than I could before I attended?

That is surely the fucking point.

If a course changes how you assess cases, improves your mechanics, helps you understand a piece of science properly or exposes a gap in your thinking, brilliant.

If you attended, got your six CPD points and cannot remember anything you learnt three weeks later, I am not sure how much professional development actually happened.

And this is not only a beginner problem.

Established trainers can spend years consuming information while rarely putting themselves into situations where somebody competent watches them train and gives them honest feedback.

Experience is valuable.

Experience doing exactly the same thing for fifteen years? Not so much.

How our own thinking has changed

This is also why the way we teach at the School of Canine Science keeps evolving.

I once thought the seminar was the answer.

Then I realised seminars struggled to provide enough depth and serve wildly different levels of experience at the same time.

Online education solved much of the depth problem.

Then I realised we could provide all the practical exercises in the world online, but we could not make someone actually do them, and we could not reproduce everything that happens when somebody is standing beside you while you work an unfamiliar dog.

Years ago, we created something called the Force Free Trick Trainer.

Remember I mentioned Dean turning up on one of those courses earlier? He absolutely blew my socks off. I remember thinking that I needed to work with this bloke again, and eventually he became my business partner.

Despite the name, Force Free Trick Trainer was never really about teaching cute tricks.

The idea was to take learning theory and make people actually apply it. Instead of simply knowing what shaping, reinforcement placement or criteria meant, you had to train.

That programme is around thirteen years old now, and our new practical immersion has grown out of everything we learnt from it.

Some people who completed the old FFTT will recognise exercises, but plenty has changed. We have removed things such as the old FFTT assessment and video-assessment work so there is considerably more time available for actual dog training.

More importantly, the idea is not that you turn up for five days and emerge as the finished article.

You won't.

The five-day experience is the beginning of a deeper practical pathway. The aim is to put trainers into situations where they work, receive feedback, adapt, train unfamiliar dogs and discover where their own gaps actually are.

I fully expect our approach to keep evolving too. If I ever become convinced that we have discovered the one perfect way to create a dog trainer, somebody should probably take me outside and have a word.

So how do you become a dog trainer?

If I had to summarise the strengths and weaknesses of some of the common routes:

University: can provide fantastic academic depth, while still leaving you needing far more practical experience.

Dog sport: can provide exceptional mechanical skill, objective criteria and enormous depth with one dog, while leaving gaps around unfamiliar dogs or underpinning science if you do nothing else.

Rescue work: can expose you to huge variation and develop adaptability, without necessarily teaching you what it means to take one behaviour through years of precise development.

Online learning: can provide more theoretical depth than I could ever fit into a seminar, while allowing you to avoid the practical exercises entirely if you choose.

Short in-person courses: provide feedback, community and nuance, but have very limited time to deliver real depth.

That is why my current view is that good online education combined with serious practical immersion is about as close as we have got to an ideal model.

It isn't perfect, but I think it does a much better job of covering the weaknesses of either approach on its own.

Whatever route you choose, keep asking yourself the same question:

What am I currently not getting enough of?

More theory? More dogs? More depth? More variation? More repetitions? More feedback?

Then go and find it.

A slightly uncomfortable question for experienced trainers

If you have been training professionally for years, you probably understand CPD already.

But when was the last time you seriously trained something difficult?

Not advised a client. Not watched another trainer. Not completed a webinar.

When did you last put yourself in a position where a trainer whose opinion you respect could watch you working a dog, tell you what you were getting right, tell you where your mechanics could improve and challenge a training decision you had made?

If you cannot remember, that might be the most useful piece of CPD available to you right now.

The goal is not to collect enough certificates that nobody questions whether you are a dog trainer.

The goal is to keep becoming a better one.

If you want to see whether one of our practical dog trainer immersions is available near you, or register your interest for a future location, you can find the details here:

View practical immersion locations and register your interest

Frequently asked questions about becoming a dog trainer

Do you need qualifications to become a dog trainer?

That depends on where you live, the work you want to do and whether a particular employer, professional organisation or referral relationship requires a qualification.

A qualification can provide useful knowledge and structure, but the certificate itself does not guarantee practical competence. Look at what the course actually teaches, how you are assessed and how much genuine experience you will gain.

Can you become a dog trainer through an online course?

Online courses can be an excellent way to learn dog training theory and behavioural science because they allow subjects to be taught at far greater depth than a short seminar.

They are much weaker if the student never completes the practical work. If you learn online, deliberately combine it with hands-on training, feedback and experience with different dogs.

Do you need a degree to become a dog trainer?

A degree can provide excellent academic knowledge, particularly around behaviour, welfare and science, but it is not the only route into dog training.

Academic knowledge and practical dog-training ability are related skills, not identical ones. Whatever educational route you take, practical experience still matters.

How do you get practical experience as a dog trainer?

Train your own dog seriously, assist experienced trainers, work or volunteer with unfamiliar dogs, seek supervised practical coaching and consider taking up a structured dog sport.

The important thing is eventually gaining both depth with individual dogs and breadth across many different dogs.

Should dog trainers do a dog sport?

I recommend it, although competition is not compulsory.

Sport provides objective criteria, repeated practice, progressive difficulty, feedback and opportunities to fail and adapt. It can develop a level of training depth that is difficult to reproduce when working only short-term pet dog cases.

How long does it take to become a dog trainer?

There is no point at which you suddenly know everything required to train dogs professionally.

You can learn enough to begin helping people relatively quickly with good education and supervision, but becoming genuinely skilled takes years of deliberate practice across different dogs and situations. Good trainers continue learning throughout their careers.

Is training your own dog enough to become a professional dog trainer?

No.

It is valuable experience, but your dog represents one combination of genetics, learning history, motivation, environment and relationship. Professional competence requires being able to adapt when the next dog in front of you is completely different.