15 Personal Training Employment Statistics

Personal Training recruitment is going through some changes lately. Our latest Raising the Bar report in 2018 already highlighted some key stats. You may not have realised it, but business skills are very important in both recruiting personal trainers and running a freelance personal training business.

Social media and digital marketing are rapidly entering the industry, adding new aspects in how Personal Trainers find clients and increase their margins and the revenue of the gyms they work for.

One thing is evident: commercial acumen is a key skill to succeed as a personal trainer. Soon, many employers will start to hire qualified personal trainers with commercial acumen. It's only a matter of time until that actually happens.

15 Personal Trainer Employment Statistics

Industry Growth

When it comes to jobs availability and security, the future looks bright for Personal Trainers.

According to Statista, the market size has been growing steadily and it will grow from 600 million GBP in 2015 to 670 million GBP in 2020.

The number of fitness instructors according to IbisWorld in the UK is 57,000 and has been growing at a reach of 2.3% from 2014 to 2019.

As we know, 80% of personal trainers are freelance, which means they run a business.

While Statista and IBISWorld provide estimates for personal training jobs, these projections don’t give many insights into the growth of personal training as a profession.

Skills Employers Need

78% of candidates lack the skills required to be successful

70% of candidates lack gym floor experience

83% of candidates have unrealistic expectations of earning potential

78% are missing commercial acumen

74% don’t have behaviour change skills or social skills

Skills Employers Are Hiring For

We researched 200 Personal Training jobs on Indeed and over 1,000 jobs on Leisurejobs to learn what skills employers are requiring when they recruit.

98% of employers don’t require commercial acumen in their job description.

Most common qualifications required: 29% of jobs require for a minimum Level 3 qualification, 12% require boxing, 10% level 2, 9% Yoga and 2% Pilates.

What does the data show:

So, this data shows that, while employers need business skills, they do not necessarily look for them when hiring. This is probably because talents with PT and business skills together is very hard to find.

So how do employers fill the gaps? They train the candidates with the most basic Personal Training skills to teach them how to run a business.

Locations With Most Listings

London and the South East are expected to represent the two largest concentrations of personal trainers in the United Kingdom, with a combined share of 47%.

Considering the area is geographically small, there is a high density of jobs in London and the South East.

Even if you live in a remote area, you can still find a Personal Training job, with the North of England hiring 21% of the total jobs analysed on leisurejobs.com and Indeed.com

Methodology

We analysed over 1,700 Personal training jobs on Indeed.com and Leisurejobs.com in the UK for 2019, revealing on-the-rise PT skills as well as cities that have the highest concentration of jobs.

Future fit Training in partnership with CIMSPA also produces every year Raising the Bar Report, which is the annual review of the physical activity workforce, training and development landscape.

Using both data sets, we identified which skills are necessary to become a great personal trainer. We also reveal that the same skills are also missing from job listings. We used Indeed and Leisurejobs data to determine most popular job locations and salaries.