August 23



How to choose your celebrant training organisation

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You’ve known for a while that you want to become a celebrant. You’ve done a bit of research on the internet and come across a few celebrant training organisations, but now you’re a bit stuck on how to choose the right training organisation for you. Does this sound like you?

Don’t worry if that’s the case! Our guide to choosing celebrant training courses will give you a helping hand. But before we go into some in-depth explanations for choosing your celebrant training organisation or training course our top advice is to look for the vibe!

Yes, the vibe. How do you feel when you look at their website? When you read about their training? Do they excite you? Does the prospect of training with them excite you, really excite you? Do they speak your metaphorical language? Are you chomping at the bit to know more about them?

Okay, so now you probably get what we mean about the ‘vibe.’ So let’s now look at some of the other considerations that you should think about when it comes to choosing your celebrant training organisation.

What kind of celebrant do you want to be?

Firstly, before you start your research you’ll want to have a good idea about what type of celebrant you want to be. Do you want to be able to deliver ceremonies that have some religious content or feeling? Some that aren’t religious at all? Humanist ceremonies? Pagan ceremonies? Or full-on interfaith ceremonies? It really does help to know what these differences are to help you decide what type of celebrant you want to be. So we’ve given a little breakdown below.

Humanist Celebrants

Humanist-accredited celebrants are celebrants who have trained with recognised Humanist bodies and associations. Humanism distinguishes itself as a belief system that centres on ‘bringing non-religious people together to develop their own views and an understanding of the world around them.’ Some Humanist celebrants don’t mind including cultural elements in their ceremonies, too.

Independent Celebrants

Independent Celebrants are celebrants who have trained (or sometimes not) with other celebrant training organisations and who do not ascribe to any particular belief system. They can carry out completely non-religious ceremonies or can help couples introduce some religious/faith/spiritual elements to their ceremonies. Depending on their personal beliefs, independent celebrants can choose how they want to work and shape their ceremonies. This could mean they offer both religious-infused and non-religious ceremonies, or they only offer non-religious ceremonies. Either way, they work with couples to explore all the different possibilities.

Our Celebrants Collective Celebrant Training courses train celebrants to become independent celebrants. We provide a robust training framework which allows individuals to choose how they want to work.

Pagan Celebrants

Druid Pagans celebrants are celebrants who lead ceremonies in accordance with their spiritual beliefs and understandings. They are trained and able to lead ceremonies, rites of passage and rituals as per their understanding of the world we live in. Most pagan celebrants are trained by one of the many Druid or other Pagan celebrant training organisations.

Interfaith Ministers

Interfaith Ministers are celebrants who have been specially trained by interfaith celebrant training organisations. They are celebrants who deeply study different religions, which enables them to create ceremonies which combine different religions and different religious elements. Specialist celebrants who help couples shape their ceremony to reflect one or both of their religions or cultural practices.

These examples don’t account for all other types of celebrants that exist but these perhaps are the most common ones.

Man and woman getting married in garden ceremony
Photo by Anna Gazda Photography

What kind of ceremonies do you want to offer?

After you’ve thought about what kind of celebrant you want to be, you’ll also want to think about what kind of ceremonies you want to do. Whether you want to be just a wedding celebrant, a baby naming celebrant, or a funeral celebrant, or whether you’d like to offer all three of the main life event ceremonies. You may decide that you only want to be exclusively a funeral celebrant or you might decide to train for other ceremonies later on.

There is no right or wrong and because of the flexibility of a celebrant career, you can add new strings to your bow whenever you feel the time is right, or not. Some celebrants start only doing weddings and baby naming and then later train for funerals. If you do a Celebrants Collective celebrant training course in weddings and baby namings, for example, you can later also take our funeral celebrant training course at a reduced rate. Also, as our course teaches you the principles of ceremony creation, once trained you’ll also be able to develop and create your own ceremonies and rites of passage celebrations. How exciting, right?

What kind of celebrant training course do you want to do?

The next thing to think about is, how you want to actually learn how to be a celebrant. All of the various celebrant training organisations and course providers have different ways of training people to be celebrants. So it’s for you to decide how you want to learn and what kind of learner you are. Are you someone who wants to be taught in person? Do you want to learn in a group alongside others? Does the idea of an online course that you can study at your leisure interest you? Do you want a quick course? Do you want a course that supports you after the course?

It’s really important to think about how you learn because the worst thing that you can do is to sign up for a course which is taught in a way that doesn’t support how you learn. So do your internal research, before seeing what courses are out there.

For example, we have designed our celebrant training courses to include a perfect combination of learning methods. Our online courses allow students to study at their own pace, where they can watch videos, do quizzes and tasks, download and read e-books at their leisure or listen to audio elements whilst driving in the car! And our twice-weekly online group tutorials allow students to meet up with their fellow trainees, ask questions, resolve doubts and go deeper into their learning. You can find out more about our celebrant training courses here.

What else should you consider when it comes to celebrant training organisations?

Along with everything else previously mentioned, you’ll also want to take a look at the celebrant training organisation as a whole. What other benefits do they offer you? What are their post-course course offerings like? Do they have a framework for supporting you after you’ve become a celebrant? Do they continue to guide you and mentor you once the course is finished? Have they got a visible and proactive celebrant community? What do their former students say about them and their training? Who are their trainers and how much celebrant experience do they have?

At the Celebrants Collective, we pride ourselves on offering the complete celebrant journey to our trainees. When people train with us and complete their training and become successfully certified, they then go on to become a Celebrants Collective Member. They graduate into our Members HQ, where their development really gets started. From setting up their celebrant business and getting off the ground and guidance and mentoring in all aspects of being a celebrant, The Celebrants Collective is a complete celebrant training and development platform.

So there you have it, a comprehensive guide to help you to choose your celebrant training organisation. To get yourself on the best path for you, so that you start your celebrant career in the right way!

If you’re ready to come and join us, we’d be excited to welcome you onboard. You can read about our wedding training here and our funeral training here, as well as sign up and get started from as early as today!

 

Main photo image by https://annamariestepney.co.uk/


Tags

celebrant courses, Celebrant training, celebrant training organisations, funeral celebrant training, wedding celebrant training


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