Making an effort to continue growing and learning is a driving force behind success, no matter what your line of work. Not only can continuous progression and expansion help people earn more money, but it can also help create a more enjoyable career.
For massage therapists and bodyworkers, this certainly rings true. As an added bonus, compiling a diverse array of skills and techniques means you may be able to weave in consistent breaks for your body, by practicing less physically intense modalities part of the time.
Massage therapists and bodyworkers are quite fortunate, for unlike many other professions, there is a wide body of continuing education available in the realm of healthy touch, and it is not hard to find. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the field of massage therapy and bodywork is a broad one, capable of almost limitless growth and advances.
Therefore, you can consider yourself lucky to be in professional practice as a massage therapist or bodyworker, with so many continuing education options right at your fingertips. Simply take a glance at what comes up when you type the words “continuing education for massage therapists” into a search engine, and the bounty is obvious.
Practitioners of healthy touch are wise to take advantage of having so much high-quality continuing education available. Make it a point to complete a certain number of continuing education classes each year, so you will be on schedule to grow and improve consistently as a massage therapist or bodyworker.
For a large number of hands-on practitioners, such a schedule may already be set up by a state or regional massage therapy and bodywork governing board. You will find that most of the states that regulate this profession require massage therapists and bodyworkers to earn a certain number of continuing education credits in order to renew and maintain their licenses to practice legally.
This is not a requirement to balk at, for it is in place for good reason. By obtaining continuing education credits, massage therapists and bodyworkers are obtaining the latest knowledge in the field of hands-on healing, and refreshing their current skills and business practices.
Get the most out of what continuing education has to offer by planning your path through various continuing education classes carefully. If you already know there is a technique you want to learn, then you are in a good position to begin the enrollment process.
Remember, however, that once you take the basic continuing education course on that technique, you may decide it is not the modality for you and your practice—and that is OK. The ability to dip in and test out different hands-on skill sets is another great aspect of continuing education classes for massage therapists and bodyworkers.
On the other hand, you may find that the modality is right up your alley, in which case you could then begin enrolling in more advanced continuing education courses on the topic, honing your skills to a level of expertise.
—Brandi Schlossberg