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Is a Ski Instructor Gap Year Worth It?
There is a version of a gap year where you travel a bit, work a job you forget about six months later, and come home not entirely sure what the point was. Then there is a ski instructor gap year. The kind where you show up not knowing many people, spend a winter on the mountain getting qualified and getting paid, and throwing shakas with your new buds. A qualification that opens doors worldwide, and a very real problem, you do not want to go home. That is the version we are talking about. The one that gives you direction. When you go into the mountains, even if you forget your lunch, you come home full.
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What You Get Out of a Ski Instructor Gap Year?
A ski instructor gap year with EA Ski and Snowboard is a way to see the world with purpose and direction. You earn an internationally recognised ski or snowboard qualification, land a guaranteed paid job offer, and get on snow every single day with world class coaches pushing your riding and your teaching. The improvement most people make in one season really surprises them, not just on the mountain but in how they communicate, read people, and think on their feet! These skills are so transferable in life, and you become a better person as a result of it. It makes you connect with all sorts of people, speak with conviction, to be patient, have a gritty persistence, to inspire, to let the creative juices flow, and to live with passion in your blood.
Tom Sharpe put it well. After his first season instructing in Niseko he said the qualification and the paid job were obvious wins. But the bigger thing was less obvious at the time, being inside a ski school, around experienced people, watching how the whole industry works. You stop seeing instruction as a gap year thing pretty quickly when you are surrounded by people who have made a life out of it. A life they are so passionate about too.
Read how Tom Sharpe's one season in Niseko became a career he never wants to leave
What Happens When You Back Yourself: From Ski Instructor to Red Bull Filmmaker
Some people do one gap year season and use it as a springboard into something else entirely. Tom Poole's mountain journey started with a school ski trip at 13 and never really stopped. After studying Photography and Media at University and knowing he did not want to work in a studio, he did an EA ski instructor season at Revelstoke. That season taught him how to work in and respect the mountains. It showed him a completely different side of skiing, freeride, powder, off-piste, backcountry that he fell completely in love with. He started shooting photos and videos of friends on days off, posting online, reaching out to the resort marketing team, taking any opportunity he could find.
Season two he was working part-time for the marketing team and part-time ski instructing. By season ten he was filming backcountry lines for Red Bull TV, National Geographic, and Sherpas Cinema. His name appeared in the credits of Warren Miller Entertainment's 75th ski movie, a filmmaker who had inspired him years before.
"I still feel like I'm just doing what I love, but now with a heavy backpack and a camera in my hands as well as skis on my feet."
That is what happens when you back yourself and show up.
Read Tom Poole's full story - from EA ski instructor to global snow film shooter
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A Gap Year With EA Ski and Snowboard Training
Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, the USA. EA Ski and Snowboard Training has ski and snowboard instructor courses and guaranteed paid job offers across some of the best resorts on earth. Tom Sharpe is still in Niseko. Tom Poole is still in Revy. Both started with one gap year season and a decision to go for it. Gap year, career change, or just chasing the snow. The pathway is real and it is faster and more straightforward than most people think. And the life on the other side of it is everything you hoped it would be.
