Certified canine trainers is a relatively new concept. When I went to school for the first time in the summer of 1990 there was no such exam. Now it is becoming more common for clients to seek our certified canine trainers. Our courses will prepare you to sit for the only national certification exam offered in the United States, The Certified Pet Dog Trainer exam offered by the Certification Council for Pet Dog Trainers. Please note that there are many schools that say that they offer certification courses but many of them are accreditations or in-house certifications meaning that they will issue you a certificate from their school. While we do this too, our course also prepares you to take the national exam.

In order to sit for the national exam there are several things that you must accomplish first. 1. take a course of learning that will prepare you to pass the exam, 2. accumulate the required teaching hours. At last look it was 300 teaching hours as a full charge or assistant instructor. That is a lot of hours. While our course includes an internship of 90 hours in which 45 of those hours must be teaching or instruction of clients and their dogs, that still leaves 210 hours. It takes most students nine months to a year or more to accumulate the required hours to sit for the national exam. 3. You must also acquire references from people in the pet training industry to sit for the exam. One must come from a client, one from a colleague, and one from a veterinarian. All of this requires quiet a bit of dedication on the student’s part and we ask you to do your homework before deciding on a course of study. Our course is not something that you can take on the weekends and expect to be a great dog trainer in a matter of weeks. It requires practice, practice and more practice.