Strategies for Introducing Career Planning to Your High School and Higher Ed Dance Students
NDEO’s Guest Blog Series features posts written by our members about their experiences in the fields of dance and dance education. We continue this series with a post by Patch Schwadron, Independent Career Consultant. Guest posts reflect the experiences, opinions, and viewpoints of the author and are printed here with their permission. NDEO does not endorse any business, product, or service mentioned in guest blog posts. If you are interested in learning more about the guest blogger program or submitting an article for consideration, please click here.
My first career goal was to become a professional ballet dancer. From age 5 to 16, my talent, training and passion lead solidly in that direction, taking me to the corps de ballet of the newly professionalized Boston Ballet. But, in my second season, my body said “no more” and I fell apart both physically and emotionally.
In my mind, I had failed, and in my adolescent black-and-white brain was sure the world of dance was closed to me forever.
What if one of my dance teachers or a parent had sat me down and said, “Let’s talk about how much you love to dance and how we can help you get back into shape to explore the range of dance settings where being short, dramatic and funny might be a better fit.”
Instead, here are the messages I absorbed from the adults around me:
- Ballet was the only dance discipline worthy of pursuit. All other forms of dance were not serious professional dance.
- It was shameful to have lost conditioning and gained weight. Getting back to dance class would be admitting weakness as well as being embarrassing. A return to the stage looked like a bridge too far.
So, I went to college with my “overweight” (not seriously!) body, took dance for gym credit, and directed my energies toward writing about theatre and dance. In later years, I found my way to building on my love of the performing arts and artists by training to become a career counselor, focused on the arts workforce. Echoes of my personal journey resounded in hundreds of client stories over my 25 years at the Entertainment Community Fund, formerly The Actors Fund.
Among my clients at the Fund were professional and pre-professional dancers facing a range of predictable challenges in pursuing and maintaining their artistic careers. Through these clients, I recognized that for the most part, teachers and other adults in the dancers’ lives had little to no understanding of how dance careers develop and evolve over the different ages and stages of a dancer’s life.
Beyond learning technique, dancers need to develop and practice strategies for managing their mental and physical health, finances, and career options. As with all their acquiring of life skills, dancers in training can benefit from practical support provided by knowledgeable adults around them. At the Fund, I responded to a request from a dance professor at Florida State University to talk to students about how to use their college years to prepare for a life in dance, as well as to engage with them and their teachers around dancers’ career management needs. The remote, interactive School-to-Career workshop that resulted became popular with other colleges, conservatories, and college audition programs around the country. In addition, I created a conversation for the parents/adults in the lives of dance students, who often admitted ignorance about dance careers as well as about the value of dance education in general.
The goal of the student-focused workshop is to provide basic career development information as well as present a framework for building sustainability and resiliency throughout the dancer’s career. The workshop for the adults shares information about the US arts and cultural sector as well as about the intrinsic value of dance education in building transferable skills important to all work and life settings.
For Students and Adults
The US Arts Labor Market is Robust
Arts careers are real work, and the U.S. arts and cultural sector comprises a significant arts workforce. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, the nation’s arts and culture sector—nonprofit, commercial, education—is an $876.7 billion industry that supports 4.6 million jobs (2020). That is 4.2% of the nation’s economy—a larger share of GDP than powerhouse sectors such as agriculture, transportation, and utilities. The arts boast a $33 billion international trade surplus (2019). The arts accelerate economic recovery: a growth in arts employment has a positive and causal effect on overall employment.
Basic Truths
- A love of dance and dancing is fundamental to a young person’s identity. As I repeat regularly, “Once a dancer, always a dancer.” No matter how the individual dancer is or is not developing in expected ways, the dancer is in a life-long relationship with dance. And like all relationships, there are ups and downs, break-ups, reconciliations, and difficult compromises, but for the individual’s sense of self, the relationship should not be erased or denied.
- There is no one true way to be a professional dancer. The good news is that expression through the body is everywhere in our culture. Adults can help students discover the range of settings in which people who move and look like them are impacting audiences and communities through dance.
- For working dancers, work is often periodic and episodic, with our country’s expanding gig economy impacting all workers across the board. Even in New York City, where arts workers are estimated to be 13% of the community, working dancers cultivate multiple income streams to support their artistic practices. There are strategies for understanding and pursuing “a portfolio career” which can be shared with pre-professional students and their adults.
- Most dance professionals generate income from non-performance work that builds on their wide range of problem-solving skills. One former client, a dancer, had a friend who was doing bookkeeping for a small company and needed someone to take over. Good at numbers, the dancer learned the basics and took over that work, generating important income while auditioning, rehearsing, and performing in various dance companies. As it turned out, the business owner was a dance enthusiast, valuing the dancer’s career success. Dancers in training should be encouraged to develop their interests outside of performance along with their dance training.
For High School Age Dancers
Dance teachers can introduce and expose dance students and their adults to the range of ways that dancers work.
- Attend live performances with students and discuss.
- Identify a variety of online performances that students can watch independently and share for the first minutes of class time. Model and encourage students in developing language to describe what they saw and how that applies to what they are doing in class.
- Ask students who are their favorite performers in any medium and what they like about them.
- Find ways to spotlight diverse dance forms, cultures, and dancer bodies.
- Organize in-person or remote conversations with dancer alums from college dance programs to share their experiences of transitioning from high school to college to performing work.
For Adults
Dance Teachers/Studios can provide support resources.
- Information and speakers on nutrition for dancer athletes
- Mental health info and professionals who have worked with developing dancers such as, Minding the Gap.
- Highlight the skills dance students learn
- Adaptability & Flexibility
- Creativity & Innovation
- Data Literacy
- Critical Thinking
- Leadership
- Emotional Intelligence
- Commitment to a Lifetime of Learning and more.
- Point out that dance training and education prepares students for a range of careers, including:
- Performance
- Choreography
- Production
- Visual Arts & Design
- Education
- Wellness
- Arts Administration
- Communications
- Business
- Technology
- Provide guidelines for selecting a college dance program
- What is the best fit for your student? Dance major vs double major. BFA/BA
- What dance forms interest your student?
- Who are the faculty?
- What are the academic courses required for dance students?
- What happens when a student sustains an injury? What kind of support?
- How often and in what settings do dancers get to perform?
- What about your student's outside interests? What are the opportunities to explore?
- Where have alums gone professionally?
- What is the admissions/audition process?
- Who is the contact within the dance department for your other questions?
- What are the school's mental health support services to students?
Moving Forward
My deep belief is that a healthy society requires a creative workforce, whose contributions are as important as other natural resources like clean air and clean water. Teachers and other significant adults can be a source of information and empowerment by providing dance students guidance and frameworks for the diverse ways in which they can thrive and impact our communities and culture at large.

Patricia “Patch” Schwadron, principal of PatchYourCareer.com, has spent more than 30 years guiding performing artists in creating overall sustainability and resilience at every age and stage of their professional lives. Recently retired from the position of Career Counselor Supervisor after 25 years at Entertainment Community Fund (formerly The Actors Fund of America), she started her professional life in her teens, performing with The Boston Ballet. Decades later, she pursued graduate training in educational psychology and career counseling at California State University, Northridge, with a focus on the career development and management needs of arts professionals. She also has a master’s in journalism from Columbia University and her undergraduate degree from Brown University.
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Interested in learning about a career in K-12 Dance Education? Check out NDEO's online resources by clicking here.
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Photo credits: Featured photo by Cory Cullington, Daniel Clifton, Aaron Davis, Katie Strzelec Photographer, headshot by Patricia Schwadron