Work Placement Requirements

As part of your course you will need to undertake volunteer work experience in order to develop your practical skills, this work experience is referred to as ‘Work Placement’. If you are employed in a suitable equine workplace, you can use this instead of placement, but you must still meet placement arrangement requirements before commencing the assessments.

Practical Assessments

Some practical assessments are completed as you go, external to work placement.

For both placement and individual practical assessments, you will need access to calm and reliable horses, three different ones in fact, to meet unit requirements.

We have three different ways you can achieve this:

1. With your own horses, or ones you have access to, and your own accredited riding coach supervising you.
2. At an approved riding centre/school with their horses, or your own, or a combination of.
3. At Tarcombe Fjords (Little River, Victoria) through a series of workshops and work placement, where our staff will supervise and assess you on site.

It is important to note that your course fees do not include any additional fees your horse riding coach or riding centre may require. Some are happy to provide learning opportunities at no additional cost (eg you already undertake lessons with them, or will do a work placement), others will require their standard lesson fees to be paid. Please ensure you discuss this with your coach or the riding centre prior to enrolment.

Suitable Workplaces

Suitable workplaces include riding schools, performance horse breeding studs, agistment centres etc.

We do not cover thoroughbred or standardbred racing studs or workplaces in our course. Although many of the concepts and skills are transferable, if you are looking to enter the racing industries, we recommend enrolling in their specific courses.

Placement Structure

Placement is very flexible in order to allow you to work the hours around other commitments, so you can divide it up any way you like to suit you and the workplace, as long as the minimum hours are met. We prefer students to complete blocks of work for each placement (5 or 10 x full days of 7.5 to 8 hours) to maximise learning potential. Your study plan will highlight when this best occurs in your course, but this is flexible.

However, we’re keen to fit in with your life, and the roster structure of the workplace you will be working at. You can choose to split placement days up (e.g. 1 day a week for 10 consecutive weeks or 1-week blocks) as long as for each placement you complete the assessments and hours required.

Linked Subjects

You must complete Handle Horses Safely including its practical assessments before you can begin your first placement. This is to ensure you have the right knowledge to keep safe whilst on placement.

We do recommend that you ensure the subjects appearing before placement on your study plan are complete before you tackle the placement assessments. Otherwise you will be completing assessments before you have done the learning – which will increase the likelihood of a resubmission.

Not all your subjects require placement for completion of the units.

Arranging Placement

Please read the Work Placement Handbook fully to understand the requirements of setting up your work placement.

Your online area ‘Work Placement Arrangement’ contains all the necessary information and paperwork for your enrolment including all the steps you must complete prior.

You must:

• Have the workplace approved as a Registered Training Workplace
• Have at least ONE approved Workplace Mentor registered
• Received confirmation of insurance from your RTO
• Completed and passed Handle Horses Safely
• Received confirmation from us you are good to go.

You will be able to access your placement assessment instructions prior to having placement arranged, but you will not be able to upload any until placement is approved.