CAREERS IN SPORT
CREATING PATHWAYS WITHIN SPORT BUSINESS
Professor Gordon Mandry and Ian McCormack, from the World Academy of Sport, offer advice on how to manage a professional career in sport
T
he successful management of sport, at all levels, depends upon having a blend of technical (sport-
specific) expertise alongside a broad set of professional skills that are also common in many other sectors of business. To better understand career pathways in sport, we want to focus on the features that make sport a unique business to operate in, how to add value to professional skills by access- ing a broader base of knowledge and by networking, and then to consider some of the emerging trends that we predict will shape the short-, medium- and long-term future of career pathways in sport.
PATHWAY TO SUCCESS For athletes, a relatively clear pathway of career development exists, based solely on performance against peers in the same sport. There will always be a gold medal winner or a competition champion and this is the relative measure of success that each athlete aspires to. Put simply, if you want to be the best in your game then you just need to be better than everyone else, and if you are the best then this should be demonstrably easy to prove.
62 Similarly for coaches, whose career
success depends on how successfully they support athletes, a clear and technically focused qualification and career pathway ladder is available in the majority of sports. However, for sport administrators – and
by using this term we mean the back office employees in a sport organisation, the individuals who drive the development of a sport organisation and help run it as a business at a functional or managerial role – a less obvious pathway of professional development is likely to exist. This particu- larly applies to some of the smaller scale organisations in sport, such as national governing bodies for non-mainstream sports and small professional clubs. Any competent and successful adminis-
trator who has spent a few years in sport is likely to have developed a specialised, yet possibly a fairly narrowly focused and sport-specific, set of career milestones. These will be related to technical exper- tise (for example, around the governance and policy landscape of the sport, rules and technical specifications), a network of peers, suppliers, contractors and an understanding of your support base.
SPORTS MANAGEMENT HANDBOOK 2012 Often within sport this is all under-
pinned by a strong sense of personal commitment. Many join this profession because they care about what they do and are passionate about developing the sport and growing its network, often from a grassroots level. This enthusiasm for the job should be cherished – how many industries can we name where this is distinctly not the case? On the other side of the coin, more
generalist skills are required to successfully manage a sport as a business. These are the more standard professional compe- tencies, such as marketing, managing and developing the network of stakeholders, accounting and human resources etc. Yet we would say that these two areas
of skills are insufficient to really make the most of a career pathway in sport. The skills needed to go the extra mile are indeed sport-specific yet they are surprisingly similar in almost any sport. This goes back to the heart of what makes a successful, competitive and innovative sporting organisation stand out from the others. Aside from technical skills there are implicit and often less tangible
www.sportsmanagementhandbook.com
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