Training Guidelines

Workload and teaching composition

• Specialist training includes at least 600 teaching units including attendance times, self-study, internships and thesis

  The specialist training must comprise a total of 60 ECTS. The scope of the individual courses is given in academic hours, whereby one academic hour corresponds to 45 minutes. The European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) is used to facilitate the inter-university and intra-European crediting of academic achievements, whereby 1 ECTS point corresponds to a workload of 25 hours. The workload in ECTS includes all activities that are part of the training in the broadest sense, i.e. the entire learning, preparation, follow-up and organisational effort of a participant. The calculation thus results in an actual effort of 1500 working hours (a 45 minutes)

• ESAAT-accredited basic training includes 75 hours, including theory, practical training of the human-animal team and self-study.

Balance

The training courses based on ESAAT accreditations include a balanced ratio of theoretical content, self-study and practical exercises. A relationship that has developed over many years of experience of our experts and enables the graduates to successfully implement the defined goals and standards in daily practice. The emphasis is on balance and sustainability. ESAAT reserves the right to supplement, change and adapt the content and scope of the accreditation regulations to practice and theory in the sense of evaluations carried out.

Europe

ESAAT is in talks with European institutions to make the training for animal-assisted specialists uniform throughout Europe in order to reduce the current wild growth of other accreditation societies (with significantly reduced training costs) or to stop it completely. We are convinced that the topic of animal-assisted intervention will only become a recognized profession if it is possible to create uniform standards. The attractiveness of the job profile will then be based on the time required for other university studies.