March 5, 2022 / By: Alex Byczko / 0 Comments 

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The Checklick Compensation Survey is back! 

Read on to learn more about this year's survey and you'll be able to download your copy here.

After a long hiatus, we have decided to relaunch the Compensation Survey and open it up to a wider Checklick user base.

2020 was an irregular year with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. We tried to capture the impact Covid-19 has had on the coaching industry and we have some really interesting comparatives from this year’s results. In this post, we'll go over our methodology, new questions, rationale, errors, and distributions. 

It goes without saying, thank you to all respondents!

In a similar fashion to last year, the polled population was a percentage of coaches who use Checklick.

Here are details about the survey;

• 224 respondents
• The survey was open to responses for 2 months
• 168 in 2017 vs 224 in 2020

That's a sizeable increase which will give us an even better sample size. Since this is our come-back survey, we expect the responses to increase as this becomes a Checklick mainstay. 

This year we asked 13 questions, 5 of which were specifically focused on the impact of Covid-19, while the others were standard fare. Standard fare questions being nationality, pay, age, experience, qualifications, etc. 

It was important for us to understand the general impact of Covid-19 on the coaching industry so we could compare which populations were the most affected. This will also set up a great data point for 2021 as we are still feeling the effects of regional restrictions, social distancing, and group sizing. 

All the questions were simply phrased and in a multiple-choice format to reduce survey attrition. All the questions on demographic information (Age, Experience, Qualifications) questions could be directly compared to previous year’s surveys.

We asked about active coaching in both 2019 and 2020 to get a baseline comparative for pre-covid and covid affected seasons. Comparing the two years, the number of active coaches essentially stayed the same. Furthermore, we wanted to gain some understanding of the environmental factors that affected coaching as a result of Covid 19 and how much coaches' income was affected. Not surprising, social distancing and group sizing was reported as the biggest factor that impacted the coaching environment.

Anecdotally, this caused some established summer sports programs to shut down entirely, reduce staffing, and/or reduce hours. We asked about how Covid-19 impacted income and 28% of respondents reported little to no change. The rest of the respondent’s answers were spread across the other response categories. This was an interesting question that led us to dig a little deeper into how this impact percentage broke down when isolating demographic data points. 

As for the rest of the questions, some of the core questions can be directly compared to previous interactions of the Checklick Compensation Survey. However, previous versions of the Checklick survey were very sailing-focused. This iteration primarily contained respondents from the sailing world with some inclusions from judo, skiing, snowboarding, and powerboating. The data here is very representative of the sailing world and can’t necessarily be generalized onto the other included sports. In the future, we'd like to see more responses from coaches of other sports.

All sports were considered in the income and demographic data. However, we do provide some isolated data for our largest populations, sportswise that is sailing and nationally that is Canada and Ireland.  

All questions were written in a way that allowed for easily categorize responses. This was to help with the data analysis. We tried to provide ranges that were easy for the respondent to choose from and had a resolution that would allow us to categorize responses. However, some questions may have had too many choices and others not enough.  We found that in our, “specify other response” sections, our multiple-choice options were not completely encompassing of the respondents who took the survey.

We saw some responses (not a significant amount) from program administrators that fell outside the options available. This was really noticeable with respondents who coach multiple sports and specified all the other sports they were involved with. When multiple sports were reported, we only counted what was reported in the “What sport are you coaching?” question. 

Canada was the largest respondent group with Ireland a close second. These two groups were compared but should be taken with a grain of salt as the Canadian sample is more reliable than the Irish one. 

In terms of pay, we did not do any currency conversions. This is an area we will look to remedy next year as we expect to see some differences between countries.

We asked about private vs group lessons. We are not able to draw a conclusion about what the income breakdown is for coaches that teach both private and group lessons. Furthermore, next year we will be polling for average private vs group lesson rates.

In the qualification vs experience question, we found that we have no metric to measure the “neither’ option choice. Currently, it accounts for 33.3% of responses, which makes us wonder how pay settles out for this population. 

Looking at age first, 19 - 23 was the largest group of respondents at 43.1% with 14 - 18 and 40+ following behind with both at 21.3%. This is an interesting cross-section of data, as in previous iterations of this survey we usually captured a beginner-heavy population. It is good to see that we are capturing more data from the older coaches in the industry. This should make the data at the higher/more experienced end of the coaching spectrum more valid and reliable. Further to this point, 40.9% of respondents had 5+years of experience in the coaching industry, with 3 years representing 20.9%. 

As mentioned in the errors, Canada represented 67.6% of the responses with Ireland representing 29.8%. Obviously, the results here can be generalized to Canada and to a much lesser degree Ireland. Another blowout distribution was found in which sport are you coaching, where sailing represents the majority of the responses.

Fairly consistent with previous iterations, this survey still contains a large amount of beginner-heavy data. Beginner coaches represented 32.4% of responses. Surprisingly though, 43.1% of responses were from advanced skills coaches. There is a potential we may be following a group of coaches through their development pathway (when considering data from 2016 and 2017) as advanced coach numbers have increased with every iteration of this survey. However, the drop in numbers after advanced skills coaches for high levels of coaching is consistent with number decreases in previous iterations. 

Taking a look at the Covid-19 specific data, there was a negligible change in active coaches from 2019 (82%) to 2020 (80%). 82% of coaches responded that Covid-19 played a factor in their ability to coach this past year with respondents showing that social distancing/group sizing (88%) being the largest factor impacting industry. Regional lockdowns and personal safety both came in over 50% due to respondents being able to select multiple options. 

The most confounding result in our survey is the 28% of respondents who reported no change in their income due to Covid-19. Isolating for age, experience, and qualification, it seems the entry levels of coaches were the least affected by Covid-19. However, this may be because these new coaches have no income benchmark or yearly comparison to measure their 2020 year against, as that may have been their first year coaching.

Here are some baseline averages on the data to help situate our next update.

Another successful survey in the books and we are excited to jump-start next year's survey to have data in your hands earlier to help with your program’s budgeting and to use our survey as a valuable resource.

We will continue to revise the survey to improve our data collection.  Let us know what you think about our survey via the comments at the bottom of this post.  

This was just the overview of the distributions.  We have some really neat analysis and insights of this data coming up in the next post where we will show data isolated for the country, age, experience, and qualification.

Stay tuned!

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