Reading beyond the PSIA manuals

    The PSIA Manuals are the best source of technical understanding for ski and snowboard instructors, but just as much can be learned from a good story. I have been reading books that relate to ski instruction and relationships since I hated reading. Let me help you give reading beyond the manuals an honest chance.

   I recognize my reading journey was kickstarted by injuries that convicted me to reading to fend off boredom. I have been severely injured several times in the last couple of years. I don't recommend getting hurt but I hope there is something in your life pushing you to read besides your willpower.

    I started with Malcom Gladwell, an author who tells real stories about big ideas in the modern world. I read outliers first, then talking to strangers, then blink and now I'm reading Tipping Point and David and Goliath. You can read them in any order. They are commonly found in thrift stores. If you also like to write and journal like me, check out Malcom Gladwell's MasterClass online. If you hate reading or have a hard time picking up books, its a good idea to start with a Gladwell and set a goal of finishing it in a week or two.

     History is another great place to start reading. I like books that cover broad topics because I like to google things and buy and read referenced content as I go along. This summer I read "Written in the Snows" by Lowell Skoog. Its more relevant to ski school and mountain workers in the pacific northwest and much of it focuses on Mt.Rainier and Mt.Baker history, but also covers Mt.Hood, Portland and Seattle's winter history. Thick and broad history books are great if you prefer to learn through video and podcast too. Almost everyone mentioned and discussed in these books has written or shared their stories. Who knows, If you ever ask for help on the mountain, you might even recognize a name-tag. If you need something more sensational to keep your attention span going, try books on the 10th Mountain Division, nothing gets young men reading like blood and bravery. Your preferences are yours but I do prefer when my war books are purely facts and stories and not glorified sacrifice tales.

     Alpine skiing technique history and alternative teaching methods are fascinating to me. Books like "Downhill Skiing" by Otto Lang(a student of Hannes Schneider) and "The New Cross-country Skiing" by Olympic coach John Caldwell. offer a comparison and contrast of new and old methods as well as expose some timeless methods and tips and tricks that work as well today as they did in the 50s. The 60s and 70s were great times for innovation in the ski industry, many of which are still around today--although sometimes hard to recognize--. Check out the Graduated Length Method by Cliff Taylor and Direct to Parallel by Harb Ski Systems for interesting takes on beginner progression not seen anywhere else in the world. 

    If you have read any of my other blog posts or visited my YouTube channel, you'll know I'm a big fan of locker room banter. Having a good base of knowledge and being able to relay ideas is a sure way to get a good conversation out of anyone in the locker room. For a full book review of everything I read this summer, head over to the "Instructor Grindset Youtube" channel and look for the summer reading series episodes.

https://www.youtube.com/@InstructorGrindset/videos 

So You Want To Be a Ski Instructor

 You’ve decided you want to look into being a ski instructor. You’ve seen a few ski movies, read a few articles about life in the mountains or maybe have a friend tempting you to inquire.

Before you try to decide which resort(s) you want to work at you need to consider if you really want to be an instructor. Because there are many other mountain jobs that could be better for you.

Ski patrol, chairlift operation, guest services, snowmaking, food and beverage services. All offering different schedules, social and technical engagement levels, training models and job availability.

In the United States, ski instructor job availability is extremely high in most places. We are talking about the traditional group and private lesson instructor jobs here and not the discipline specific coaching jobs. But there is a catch; your first few years as an instructor will be a full time commitment with part time hours and you will spend the majority of your days on the magic carpet. Ski school hiring staff are aware of the tedious career curve that comes with becoming a ski instructor. If you are thinking of doing this long term or as a career, you must learn to love spreading passion for the sport to newcomers, it's what keeps the sport alive. There is a whole market for experienced instructors specializing in beginner lessons, some mountains even pay first timer instructors a bonus.

As the nation develops and enforces certain standards for ski instructors, good teaching becomes more important than raw skiing ability. Most instructors don’t rip deep carves or do backflips, they ski with proper technique and can go anywhere on the mountain. If you pop backflips don’t worry, your attitude will be appreciated. Diversity and all that. When I started I was neither a good skier or a good teacher. I had bad grades most of my schooling career. I didn’t know how my life would pan out. All that was clear to me was; if I’m going to do as poorly in life as I did in school I will need to at least be doing what I love. And my best chance to turn around is to find a career in which I can educate myself at my own pace, choose to study and train by myself or in a group, have a mobile and flexible lifestyle, and work in a hands-on environment with high engagement standards. How well you did in school has little to do with your potential as a ski instructor. In fact, many people start teaching after 4-5 years of university. Type-A instructors are weird and stuck up, but they still get the job done. As a 15 year old my perceived competence was low. so was my confidence. Ski school gave me time to develop. These are the attributes that let me decide ski school was right for me.

I didn’t have the stomach or maturity for ski patrol and wanted to ski too much to be a lifty. I was not confident enough to be a groomer or on park crew, too restless to be in guest services, not disciplined enough to be in food and beverage services. I never met anyone who could relate to the type of child I was but my first mentors in ski school understood who I was when I first showed up. Odds are some old timer will get you up to speed in your first few seasons no matter where you are from or when you start.

It's almost like a ski school ethos is built to attract a highly diverse set of minds. The experienced staff of a small ski school works up a unique culture of educational responsibility. Some kind of extreme liability; they truly want this job to be for everyone. That's how they manage to have a workforce that can represent every snowsports consumer. Many mistakes that can be made by a new instructor can be traced back to lack of training. Most problems that arise during or after a lesson can be summed up to “ instructor wasn’t told or shown at all or well enough” If you show up to ski school with intent to learn, the only thing left in your way is you, get out of your own way, ski powder, meet people and the more fun you have, the more passion you will transmit to your students.

If you are still reading this you are ready to learn about every ski school's greatest asset, the locker room. This is where you can find an immeasurable amount of experience and knowledge. Every instructor has to boot up in the morning, this is your chance to ambush as many geezers as you can with your dumb questions and fun stories. You can learn more about a place and its community in a ski school locker room than at any local bar. Odds are most instructors have been involved with the community since long before they worked for the mountain. And those who haven't, have traveled far and wide before ending up in that locker room. You will meet fathers and mothers, half retired tech wizards, college professors, professional skiers and entrepreneurs. Some are career instructors, some don’t even love skiing and just do it as a side gig. The diversity that can be found even just within a bunch of musty 45 years old white upper middle class skiers and snowboarders is astounding. (You start to grow younger after 45. 45 is the oldest someone can be, unless you forgot to have fun while chasing that degree, in that case your maximum age is more like 49).

Once you are taking full advantage of the locker room there is only one thing that can get in your way, it's about as tall as you, as ugly as you, you see it in the mirror every morning, it's you, get out of your way. You will meet the dark figures of the locker room too. Those who aren’t here to stay, they show up as locals, weathered travelers and everything in between. The half committed false shepherds befriend new employees from out of town and tempt them with late nights out and alternative, non health related activities. Let's talk about drug use. You didn’t click on my blog to be told drugs are bad and instructors never do them. Drugs are awesome and lots of instructors do them. Your first few years as an instructor, you may feel like you are not being used to your maximum capacity at work. You should be filling that less busy work time with as much studying and socializing as possible. I’ll do you a favor and be vague so you can decide for yourself. Your first 2 or 3 seasons as a ski instructor dictate a few things; whether or not you travel the world and ski year round, whether or not you work for an all inclusive resort that feeds you and shelters you for free, dumping you back into the real world with $20,000 in your pocket, whether or not you build a private lesson client base that you can live off of, whether or not you are starting to build the skills you need to be one day self employed in an extremely competitive entrepreneurial environment. Keep in mind, most middle aged instructors aren’t there by chance, they had past careers in industries with much, much higher stakes. These instructors are so confident and competent they are daring to live off a passion. It's as hard as it sounds for them, and for you as well. Don’t let that get you down, your youth and starting young is your greatest asset, time is on your side when you are 16-20 and if you dedicate your time you will be certified sexy and unforgettable. 

Now you understand that doing this long term is as easy as getting out of your own way. Let's talk about how to actually rise to the top.

Certifications:

There are many certification pathways. Your region may have special accreditation as well. Do at least 2 levels of your primary interest. Keep an open mind about pathways that sound different, you have time to do it all.

National categories:

Alpine skiing

Children's Specialist

Snowboarding

Nordic(Cross-Country)

Telemark 

Adaptive

Freestyle

At the very least do your main discipline, it will be either skiing, snowboarding, nordic or telemark. Once you have a level one certification, go straight for children's specialist 1. It's relatively easy and very interesting. Children's Specialist 1 acts as a direct job difficulty decreaser. Once you've done it, you will never work as hard to facilitate fun ever again.

If building your certification portfolio is like building a sail, mentor relationships and meaningful connections will be your wind. If you have any say in locker assignments, try to get in on the elder’s corner. So often I see all the J1 and Gen-X instructors all on one side of the locker room with elders on the other. You can talk to other people that are your age and certification level in employee housing, training and on days off. At first, a good locker assignment will get you close to potential mentors and at the very least lets you overhear an effective lesson recap now and again. If your lockers are assigned by a manager you need to urge them to move you closer to the fully certified veterans. If a locker in the veterans corner opens up mid season, ask a manager to give it to you. Invest in proximity.

Have a social goal for the season. For example: Ask 1000 questions. Ask 25 levels 3s what their life looked like from age 20-30. Inquire about company benefits. Inquire about certification scholarships. I personally like the “ask 1000 questions” season goal, it's not meant to be taken literally. When paired with proportional use of ears and mouth, you can really get somewhere with these goals, maybe even try 80% listening and 20% talking or less.

Have a guest experience focus, weekly or monthly, cycle and stack them. For example: Call private lesson client the night before the lesson. Help the first guest of the day 3 or 4 times a week. Offer to help carry something for a guest 7 times a day. Making the guest feel important is not only important for consumer retention, it gives you a chance to learn your job wholly. 

Most ski schools match instructors with clients based on a priority list. Highly certified instructors teach higher skilled students and more private lessons, they get more work too. Uncertified instructors get beginner lessons, sent home or have to teach lessons on the powder days when certified instructors “backline”.

Supervisors may ask you if you want to work, others don’t have to say yes but you absolutely do. Backlining is when you tell your boss you don’t want to work and you are last to receive a lesson if at all. There is a catch, if you do get a lesson, it's a beginner lesson. I know some instructors that ski a lot of powder and teach a lot of beginner lessons, if you don’t think that's fair, get certified.

Beyond the priority list is your standing with supervisors and managers. At some schools it doesn’t apply to your day to day and whether your boss likes you or not doesn’t affect how much work you get. At other schools, it trumps the priority list. You can’t know a ski school’s priority culture until you’ve worked there and it's not important enough to help you decide where to work.

Picking a mountain is simple, listen to your heart. If your research on a particular mountain tells you it's too corporate for you then it probably is. My favorite metric to judge whether a resort is right for me is by estimating density. If a resort is close to a big city, has trams and high speed chairs, is known for being expensive and people go anyway, it's probably a dense resort. If the housing market is inflated, it's dense. Look at promotional content on Youtube. PeakRankings is a Youtube channel that reviews resorts from the consumer perspective and may offer insight on pros and cons. Housing is a crisis in small mountain communities. Many ski resorts offer employee housing to achieve full employment. Employee housing can be cramped and inconvenient. Try finding a roommate on Facebook housing groups and requesting a room with them. This reduces the odds of living with someone coming from a past so unstable they destabilize the people around them. For me those odds are about 80% for years in employee housing without requested roommates. Cheap non employee housing starts at roughly $750/month in late summer and goes up to about $1200 for people moving in December. If you can, try getting a job at a restaurant or really anywhere, get onsite and start looking for potential roommates. 

If you are considering a career in snowsports education, know that taking it seriously will put you ahead of about 40% of instructors right off the bat. Pick a resort that gives you incentives to take the job seriously. If you want to work at a certain ski school for only 1 year, give yourself a reason to do your very best. Most ski school employees have summer jobs, own businesses etc. and building meaningful connections can help you find work close to the mountain even if being a ski instructor isn’t for you. You have to give those people your most genuine engagement if you want to put your foot in that kind of door. Your goals don’t all have to be specific or quantifiable, you don’t have to literally ask 1000 questions. Failing exams happens, if you think you failed or messed up you need to continue to do your best because the potency of your evaluation needs to be accurate for you to progress. If you decide that doing this long term is for you, do your best to show up to your local spring conventions. And most importantly, remember to ski for yourself, apply for the free ski pass and supervisors expect you to use it.

Takeaways From a PSIA Youtube Binge

Youtube and the PSIA website continue to be a valuable resource for me. They have been uploading presentations and training videos for 15 years now and I’ve yet to find one that is outdated. Want to know how PSIA communicates the unique challenges of a relatively high diversity snowsports environment? There is a 13 year old presentation by PSIA Alpine Team Member Michael Rogan, AASI Team Member Josh Spoelstra, PSIA Adaptive Team Coach Bill Bowness, and PSIA Nordic Team Member Ross Matlock. Want to watch a video on teaching balancing versus bracing? You will fall in love with Debbie Artmstong’s style. Want to re-watch the 2013 members recap? It's all there, for free! There are almost 400 videos on this channel alone and many other organizations have instructor focused channels focusing on a wide range of topics. Rookie Academy, ISASKI, CARV, Instructor Grindest, EA ski and snowboard training are just a couple of them.

One video that stood out in my most recent Youtube binge was a National Academy 2018 opening general session presented by Jeff Johnson. He mostly mentioned little things we know we can improve on but don’t get judged on harshly enough to prioritize; not remembering names, talking too much, lack of instructor-guest connection on topics outside of skiing. Smoothly enough these solutions are packaged as one liners to be easily broadcasted by you at your local ski school. Jeff Johnson filled the room to the ceiling with his energy and got us engaged with his first point. 

Be assertively friendly. We have all heard of the infamous ski instructor huddle, managers have been cracking down on it for as long as any of us remember. There are two common reactions by instructors once their unapproachable huddle gets broken up by a supervisor; most open the circle up to a line and go on with their conversation, while the more talented and attentive ones break from the formation and head straight for the nearest yet to be greeted guest. Which one are you? And which do you think is more effective at delivering a warm welcome to tourists on the most stressful and busy vacation of their lives? Helping guests with their dropped poles and scissoring skis as they walk up to lesson check-ins is an easy way to put yourself on the supervisor’s radar for the next private lesson, and a sure way to get the guests to feel welcome. Being assertively friendly should extend outside of lign-up and lesson checkout, if you are in uniform you must help people out on the hill; dropped poles, making sure guests know where to get warm by engaging in conversation on the gondola and letting them know their sock is untied or they dropped their pocket is a sure way to score some karma. By actively seeking contact with the guests instead of being asked for directions, you make the guest feel important and that's what makes them want to come back.

Instead of listening to respond, listen to remember. Jeff had the crowd participate in a simple experiment: Meet as many people as you can in two minutes. Ready, go! The whole room stood up with a mission to gather as many handshakes and names as possible, the room bustled and everyone looked busy. At the end of the two minutes Jeff got their attention and easily turned their attention to him. Jeff then asked a few people how many people they had met, the answers ranged from five to fifteen, but no one remembered all those names, they could only remember two or three names! When we listen to respond, we are already thinking of what we will say long before our interlocutor is done talking, it's not real listening. In the second phase of the experiment, Jeff asked the crowd to meet people and listen to remember. People already knew what to do, they met less people and tried to find something to remember each other by, a connection! Once the two minutes were up, Jeff had a hard time getting everyone’s attention again. When asked how many others some of the people in the audience had met, they said two or three, the same number of names they remembered from meeting as many people as fifteen people! However, everyone could remember the names. When Jeff asked them why they remembered their names, they couldn’t stop talking about what they learned about the other. Listening to respond is helpful in a few situations but ski instructors need to listen to remember if they want to build a connection with the guest.

You have two ears and a mouth, use them proportionally. I can recall a really embarrassing chairlift ride I had with a private lesson client that fits this well. This was a middle aged mom who wanted to ski so she could ski with her kids. I taught her how to ski from her day one till she was ready for upper mountain green runs in Vail. One the second day we were riding the chair and she interrupted to say, “I just love the silence and peace of the mountain.”. It may not have been a hint to shut up already but I sure took it as one. As I sat awkwardly on the second half of the chair I reflected and realized I had been talking nonstop for a total of fourteen hours, and most of it wasn’t necessary, helpful or constructive of a connection. I had failed to use my ears and mouth proportionally. She knew where I was from, what I did in the summer, everything and I just knew she wanted to ski with her kids. For years I carried around the presumption that I should simply speak less and be more concise. Jeff formalized the solution to my problem perfectly with a trick, spoiler alert, its rizz. Ask more questions than you divulge information; 80% of the talking should be done by the conversation partner. Jeff goes on to describe a conversation he had with his wife and tried the rizz he had acquired from a friend. He redirected all his wife’s questions with a short answer and another question. When you ask more questions and speak less, your conversation partner doesn’t really notice, it's just a conversation to them and they love it. By using your ears more than your mouth you give yourself the chance to engage the guest early on in the conversation.

Understanding the emotional roller coaster with feel, felt, found.

It’s a rainy Saturday.

She could sleep in, wakes up at 5am,

Gets in the car not even awake,

There's traffic,

Trying to find a parking spot,

Its snowing and it's all slippery,

She’s out of her element,

She has like 10 layers of clothing on,

Comes into the rental shop, whoomf, its 80 degrees in there,

Sweating, stinky helmet on her, they give her the skis,

She doesn’t know how to carry them, walking in awkward boots,

And then there’s you!

There’s a method for helping the guest turn the mood around so they can quickly get to the part where they are grateful they came. First is to feel, empathize with the guest and let them know you understand how they feel. Second is felt, you can tell them about somebody who felt the same way. And found, tell them how that other person found that things are not so bad and that when they did what you want them to do they found that it was actually a very good thing to do. Jeff nailed it as far as what to say goes. Being assertively friendly is the piece that ties this plan together. You can tell Jane doe how to feel better about what's coming up all you want and you should, but helping her carry her gear and generally making her feel important is what gets her to come back. A great way to get guest’s chins up and looking forward to the rest of the day.

Remembering names right from the get-go is a great way to move the conversation forward quickly, you should still play name games to help kids remember each other's names, hopefully now you have a couple tools to add creative twists to the all too boring “Lets go around and say our names” task. Guests are spending more and more time, money and energy planning their next ski vacation. It's only fair that their expectations of personalized experience should be high, being assertively friendly helps guests feel welcome in a sport where first timers only come back 18% of the time. Remembering meaningful details about guests can be useful for personalizing a lesson and strengthening a connection later on in a lesson, and you can gather a lot more useful information by listening more and asking more questions with your newly acquired rizz. Communicating empathy is an important part in helping guests transition from an emotional roller coaster to carefree cruising. We instructors can’t get by without doing these things, skiing is a slippery slope and its people are the only thing helping people stick to the sport.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoNkaOViiss

Settle down, non-believers..

All too often I meet instructors and former instructors who quit or stopped their certification pathway because they felt the certification process didn’t reflect their learning process and competencies. I disagree with them. So many instructors think the PSIA certification pathway doesn’t reflect the competence of an instructor simply because they can have a great lesson with great outcomes. Even if they can't describe their decision making process in words afterwards. They say PSIA isn’t tailored to skiers who’ve been skiing religiously since birth. That it doesn’t represent high level skiing or the alternative motives to ski. The skiers who aren’t coming to the mountain to ski like Olympics skiers. I disagree. PSIA isn’t here to tell us how to experience the mountain. They are here to guide us in delivering an effective and consistent way to get people around the mountain. An engaged ski instructor understands this right away. PSIA helps us package a lesson so it is consistent nationally and gives us the tools to keep guests safe. Nothing in the PSIA handbooks or resort policy prevents you from going bird watching, tree climbing, hiking, building an igloo, having a snowball fight, making graffiti in the snow with food dye. If you think it's PSIA’s job to get to know the guest for you, you’ve got it all wrong. If you think PSIA is here to police and limit what your lessons should look like, you’ve got it all wrong.

PSIA gives us proof of this idea first thing in their beginner progression manuals. If they were hellbent on teaching everyone to ski a GS course, would the wedge be part of the skiing progression? We know that the wedge is a completely optional technique in skiing. That we don’t use it when going fast and we only see it at the top and bottom of the mountain in the Olympics. Without the wedge, I never could have gone on a safari during my children’s specialist level one exam. I never could have gone birdwatching with Timothy. These same misinformed rookies often love to argue that PSIA isn’t for high level skiers either. That's right, because that's not their job. Their job isn’t to develop high level skiers. It’s to give you the knowledge and resources to develop them yourself. Yes, many ski instructors are old, and ski slow. But they always enthusiastically, and often even expertly serve their function, to teach skiing at the level they are certified to teach. And the less time and effort you spend trying to figure out how to get your guests to progress, the more attention you can dedicate to personalization of a lesson.

PSIA's job is to make sure you are not full of crap. Whether you want to become a creative and engaging instructor who represents the fantasy of living in the mountains is up to you. 

Backline Like a Pro

            To understand backlining you must understand the priority list. Every ski school has some form of priority list. It is a list of all ski instructors in order of certification level, year of experience, hours taught in the previous season. Supervisors use this list to assign lessons without biases. Instructors high on the list get the advanced lessons while lower ranking instructors teach beginners. If you are low enough on the list you may not have work every day, you get cut. Whether you want to teach a lesson everyday is up to many personal reasons. Your position on the priority list affects how much work you get as well as what kind of response you get from a supervisor in your attempts to backline. 

Backlining is the art of asking your supervisor to place you at the bottom of the priority list for the day. Whoever is below you on the priority list takes your lesson. This doesn’t guarantee you will be cut. There is a catch, when you are at the bottom of the priority list, you are essentially volunteering to take on any new comers or beginner lessons and you may still have to check in for afternoon lessons. Say your friends are in town and you want to ski with them for a day, you can’t always take time off for this reason, this is an appropriate reason to backline. Your supervisor will place you at the bottom of the priority list and if you are lucky, you get cut. It's that simple at a glance.

Backlining is not a negotiation, you are asking your supervisor to do you a favor. There are times when it's completely inappropriate to ask, and ways to ask that will grant you a hard no for an answer. If your goal is to stay in good intrinsic standing with your supervisors, never backline your first year and during weekends and holidays. Backlining during school breaks depends but it should also be avoided. Supervisors don’t remember how many times you request a backline, they remember how it made them feel. Which is dictated by their workload and other personal factors. It is most appropriate to backline when your supervisors expect it. They expect people to backline on powder days, February and April weekdays and when your family is visiting the resort. Try your best to gather a good idea of how busy the school is going to be and how the supervisors are feeling whether or not you are planning to backline.

Keep in mind that the Supervisors’ job is to assign the most qualified instructor to every lesson. Generally, The more certified you are, the more likely you are to get work even if you backline. And the more likely supervisors are to be tilted if you try to get a less qualified instructor to cover for you. The strategy for professional instructors helps us get through this predicament.

Backlining as a casual instructor is different from doing it as a career instructor. Or rather, your supervisor’s expectations are different. If you are teaching part time or not working to increase your priority for the next year, you can consider yourself a casual instructor. You have quite a bit of freedom from the political implications of backlining during busy times. Feel free to backline during weekdays and school breaks no matter your certification level or placement on the priority list. 

If you are a professional instructor and will rely on connections and intrinsic standing with supervisors to advance in your career, or ultimately make your job easier. You have to apply a strategy that supervisors can see. You can never backline during school breaks, weekends and holidays. Even if it's a powder day or your family is visiting. The strategy that has gotten me the most freedom to backline is as follows. Build up your karma from the first impressions on. Christmas break is your chance to be first in last out of the locker room everyday. Setting up and taking down fences and beginner areas is your most powerful favor to perform. You know you are doing it consistently when you are already outside when the first supervisor comes out, and you teach other instructors to set up properly. If you do this, you will also be one of the more approachable instructors, you will be closer to supervisors when they need something from you. Take as many of these side quests as you can, enthusiastically. Once you get an idea of what they regularly ask of you, do it without being asked once in a while. No  need to do their job for them , just pick one task to do without being asked. This is huge. Once lineup starts and guests start walking up to their instructors, be the most approachable, wait outside the rentals to help beginners carry their gear. Supervisors remember who delivers exceptional service and who stands in the back talking to their friends. These are things you can do to stand out no matter how much experience you have teaching actual lessons. This helps. But if you want a particularly high success rate with backlining. Communicate your backlining intentions ahead of time with your supervisors. This does 2 things. It lets them know what to expect from you. And gives you a chance to see their reaction well in advance. That gets you a long way. Lastly, and this is something I have personally tried, don’t backline in the first half of the season. When praised by a supervisor, say thank you and let them know you are building karma so you can backline in the second half of the season. Be truly honest, in my experience, I’ve never gotten a negative response. At the end of the day, they decide if you can backline or not. “I’m doing all this so you’ll be more likely to let me go if I backline in March.”, “I’ll do it [the favor] if you let me backline in 3 months.”. 

Most instructors start the season off really excited to ski powder and go ride with their friends. They backline when it's snowing. Many still have good money in their bank account from their summer job. Many work through the holidays and think the money will be constant for the rest of the season. So what happens in late February when the biggest storm of the season hits? They have to eat and they have exhausted all their karma as they got it. When you are backlining this is who you are competing against. Because many ski schools don’t write an official priority list based on the overall priority list. When two people backline and a late beginner shows up. They ask themselves, “Who do I think will give a better lesson?” and “Who deserves the day off more?”. When the instructors who backlined on every powder day in January want to backline in February, supervisors often tell them to rock, paper, scissors and figure out who’s backline is more justified. Getting the supervisor to vouch for you is a sure way to give you an edge and avoid a game of rock, paper, scissors.

So you have been working hard for 2 months. The working holiday and part time instructors are poor and hungry. Your supervisor knows you haven’t backlined a single time yet. You no longer have competition. Even if you did, they vouch for you and you go skiing. From now on. Every Miracle march powder day, every shorts and t-shirt day of April is yours. When spring break hits, you give 1 or 2 weeks of that holiday excellence and seal your reputation for next season. That is how you backline like a pro.

There isn't really such thing as too much backlining. I wish I could tell you how the maximum number of times you can

backline in a month or a season. It all depends on your ski schools culture. But you may not always need to backline. Don't backline when you can take time off or when you can get someone to cover for you. If you have an industry related exam, you can take that time plus one or two travel days. If you are sick, call in. If you are burned out, you can get excused time off to go take an exam or attend industry related events. You can also tell supervisors you are burned out. Their job is to assign the highest qualified instructor to every lesson, many consider burnout to be an excusable disqualifier.

Always remember to be genuine, communicate with supervisors while keeping in mind that they have a business to run. Manage the expectations of everyone around you. Work hard and enthusiastically and the strategies here will work. Give praise where it is due and make sure your efforts are noted. It's not rocket science.

-Alexandre Boss