During my 33 year and counting career, I have had so my experiences and developed many more skills than most people would realize are possible when working in only one industry. I felt it would be beneficial to share a summary of these skills and experiences, so people better understand why I feel it is important to share this information with others. When training new staff I find it is very easy to overwhelm people, so if it is written down they can go back to it at a later date.
Pool Manager
During the course of my career, I’ve managed eight different pools. Even though the official job titles may have varied over the years, the role is essentially the same. This role included everything from programming the pool, scheduling staff, hiring, discipline, training of new and existing staff, marketing for the programs, pool operations, customer service, health and safety, as well as lifeguarding, and teaching swimming and leadership classes.
Lifeguarding
Over the years I have lifeguarded at many different types of pools, including both indoor and outdoor pools. The pools have varied in complexity, from multiple simple six lane 25-metre 0.9 to 3-metre depth with a hot tub or toddler pool or both, and a waterslide. I have also lifeguarded a 4-metre deep dive pool, a 10 lane 25-metre lap pool, and a wave pool.
Teaching swimming
Teaching people how to swim is something I’ve really enjoyed, and I have taught swimming to babies as young as 4 months with their parents, all the way up to adults. I have been very involved in the adapted aquatics program at various facilities that I have worked at. I have taught learn to swim and water safety classes, lifesaving classes, and aqua fitness classes.
Budgeting
Staying on budget in an organization is something I have a lot of experience doing. I have worked in organizations with an almost non-existent budget where we used old plastic jugs instead of barbells, and planned fundraising activities so we could purchase additional program supplies.
Several of the organizations I’ve worked for have had multi-million dollar aquatics budgets. Some had budgets that were broken down to the point that the swim teachers had to code each individual level of swim lessons they taught. This was a pain in some ways but really taught me more about budgeting in the long run, and made it easier to request additional budget when I could easily show that the revenue would also increase if I had extra budget. I was always able to stay within my budget unless there was a valid reason not to, for example legislation changes requiring additional staffing.
Teaching Leadership
Educating others is something I really enjoy, and I have taught a variety of subjects, including WHMIS (Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System), first aid and CPR, as well as how to be lifeguards, swimming instructors, and lifesaving instructors. Training the trainer is something I have extensive experience with, including teaching others how to teach lifeguard classes, lifesaving, and first aid.
Hiring
I’m sure that I have interviewed well over a thousand people and hired several hundred over the last 30 years. The hiring processes that I have led, and been a part of have included those in smaller communities where I taught all of the applicants, and therefore knew their skills and their personality to some extent, so all that was required was only a simple verbal interview.
Some of the challenges I’ve tackled included group hiring for multiple pools all at the same time, where we would invite all qualified applicants (often 50-60 candidates) to an information session, and explain the positions available and the hiring and training process. Those still interested in continuing were invited to the pool deck for a skills assessment that included lifeguard physical standards. The physical standards are not that easy, and all staff were required to swim to the bottom of our 4-metre deep pool and bring a 9 kg weight to the surface.
After the skills assessment successful candidates were invited to a verbal interview where we interviewed in teams, and the interviewees rotated through various stations being asked different questions at each station. Afterwards we discussed the candidates and invited those successful to an on-deck guard scenario trial. At times, we would include a first aid rescue component in the hiring process.
I have also been part of interview panels to hire supervisory staff, and even my future supervisor or recreation director.
Training new hires
Training of new hires has been an important part of my responsibilities, and I have put all these new hires through in-house training. This training has typically included topics such as how to use our software, process for registrations, pool operations, customer service, cleaning practices and standards, health and safety (including WHMIS), and how to effectively scan the pool as a lifeguard.
Another important part of the training I’ve done is teaching swim teachers how to correctly evaluate swimmers in lessons, and how to teach a lesson that is so much fun that the kids never want to leave or to ever have a different teacher.
Health & Safety
Health and safety is a very important issue at pools, and I’ve always been heavily involved in the health and safety of the swimming pools that I have worked at. Some of the health and safety training I’ve participated in includes teaching first aid and CPR to new and current employees, teaching WHMIS (essentially how to identify and safely handle dangerous materials), writing and reviewing safe work practices and safe operating procedures, writing hazard assessments, and drafting a new way of writing hazard assessments.
Occasionally staff would get injured, and I wrote incident reports and do the follow-up investigation. I was asked to assist others within the recreation department in updating their hazard assessments and, once completed, asked to assist the entire organization in updating theirs. I then assisted in rewriting the health and safety manual for the organization.
Customer Service
Another important part of my experience is customer service, and I really enjoy interacting with people in this way. Helping people have a fun and fulfilling experience is a rewarding part of my job. It may not always be easy or fun, but it is important, like having to explain to a group of teens that they can’t do the fun thing that they have been doing because they will hurt themselves, someone else, or a piece of equipment.
One organization that I worked at told us to consider all of the customers guests, and treat them like you have invited them into your home, often siding with the guest is right.
My goal is to always deal with our guests in a respectful way, so they have an enjoyable experience, want to come back to our facility, and have positive things to say about us to their friends and families.
Pool operations
I have been deeply involved in the mechanical operations of pool facilities right from my start in aquatics. My experiences range from adjusting pool chemicals, dealing with fecal releases, and backwashing the pools in the start, up to doing everything myself. For problems I was not able to fix on my own, I would consult with various trades such as a plumber, electrician or the pool supplier to have them attend and solve those problems. The trades people that I dealt with recognized that I would only contact them if there was an issue that I couldn’t deal with, and would often drop everything to come and help me.
The pool facilities I’ve worked at have had a variety of chlorination systems, including gas, liquid and salt. I’ve changed countless numbers of chlorine tanks, and cleaned gummed up liquid chlorine pumps. I have super chlorinated pools with both liquid and dry granular chlorine.
Salt pools are much more common now, and I have done almost all the maintenance on salt pools including changing lectranator cells, cleaning the cells, troubleshooting why the alkalinity won’t stay high enough. In assessing alkalinity issues, I’ve had to resort to temporary fixes such as reducing the feed to a trickle, though the only permanent solution to eliminate the need to add sodium bicarbonate was to add a carbon dioxide system.
Another more recent innovation is UV disinfection, and I have worked at pools using UV disinfection systems.
As part of my work, I have worked closely with health inspectors and pools suppliers to understand the systems that we have at our facilities. I’ve been able to learn a great deal from them all along the way, and have been able to apply that knowledge everywhere I have worked.
Recreation Programming
Not only have I done the swimming pool programming, planning what will happen in the pool at any given time, including lessons, public swim, aqua fitness classes, adult swim, etc, but I have also done recreation programming. This programming has included developing new programs, planning when the programs will run, who will teach them, where the programs will be run (our facility or a partner facility such as a school), how much we will charge for the program, and how we will promote it.
Marketing – Recreation guide & voicing radio
An important promotional tool for recreation and pool facilities was the printed recreation guide. They are still being created, but the Internet has made the publication part a lot easier. I have a lot of experience in writing and proof-reading recreation guides. Most organizations created a recreation guide booklet to promote their programs and schedules. I have also created many flyers and posters to promote programs. I’ve also been fortunate enough to help write and voice radio ads. I really enjoyed being on the radio and was complimented by people at the radio station for often being able to do voiceovers in one take!
Scheduling
One of the lesser known, more complex, and perhaps under-appreciated aspects of working in recreation is scheduling. I have extensive experience in this, and the goal is to try and make everyone happy, from upper management, to the public, to employees. It is not always an easy task, and some experience in juggling might help!
I would typically start the scheduling process with scheduling programs into the pool, or other facilities, and continue on with staff scheduling of those programs. I would often build one schedule that would last for 10 to 12 weeks or more. One of the more challenging aspects of this was scheduling around full-time and part-time employees, accounting for individual holiday time and public holidays, school (many part-time employees were often still in high school or are attending university), and special events.
Once the tough part of completing the schedule was done, modifications to the schedule were often necessary, based on sickness and vacations, including helping staff find coverage. Life happens, so you have to be able to deal with these changes and balance a variety of priorities. In the early part of my career, I started with schedules using pencil and paper, moved on to Excel spreadsheets, and finally to paid software where you could print the schedule with multiple views, or view and request shift changes online in software packages, such as When to Work.
Design & Commissioning New Pool
I was fortunate to be involved in the design and commissioning of a new pool in one of the communities that I worked in. My supervisor would often call me down the hall to look at the floor plan drafts as she received them. We would then look at them and discuss the pros and cons of what we saw. Some of the changes that I recommended and she then took up the chain to the appropriate people include – moving the storage room, supervisors office, and staff room around so that the supervisors had a window overlooking the pool deck. Reducing the number of windows was also a large part of the revisions that we made, and modifying the chemical storage rooms to include hydraulic lifts rather than stairs between where the chemicals arrived and were being used.
When it came to commissioning the new pool, we very quickly realized that the pool was not handed over in a ready to open state. We needed to work long hours to ensure that it was cleaned to the standard that we expected including draining the pools to attempt to remove epoxy grout from the tops of the tiles (many chemicals and cleaning methods were tried), cleaning excess grout off wall tiles, polishing stainless steel, etc. This then progressed to trouble shooting things once open such as the lifeguards not being able to adequately lifeguard due to the sun shining in their eyes and purchasing PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) sunglasses for them until we could purchase and install remote control blinds for the windows that we didn’t want.