If you are serious about going into practice as a hypnotherapist, you need to ensure that you have the best training possible. It is actually a very competitive field and you will need to learn how to set up and maintain a practice, and also need to be certain that you have adequate post-graduate support.

As yet (at January 2007) there are no regulations within the world of hypnotherapy, nor are there any even on the horizon. Much effort is being made by reputable bodied to create a sensible criteria for Voluntary Self Regulation which will stipulate a set of minimum standards. Certainly it is likely that anybody who trains now should be considering very carefully the standard of their training.

An Industry Standard

Although there are no 'set' rules and regulations at the moment, there is an 'industry standard' to which most of the better schools adhere, the main being that the course should consist of an absolute minimum of 140 contact hours in the classroom, 50% of which should be practical work, and a further 350-450 hours of home study and case study work.

There is another important consideration, too... Membership of the major Associations or Societies for Hypnotherapists. Currently, it is not mandatory to join one of these and, in fact, there is no 'official' association nor one that is endorsed by the government over any other. If your training or training school is deemed inadequate, then you would not be able to achieve membership of any of the better associations, one effect of which would be that your professional insurance would be more expensive (almost all the bona fide Associations have a members insurance scheme in place). Distance learning courses are almost never accepted as adequate training, these days, though there is nothing to actually stop you going into practice if you are forced, for some reason, to train via that method. After two years in practice, you should be able to obtain membership of the better bodies but that situation might change once new regulations are in place.

If you want to find out more about how to choose a good training school (and avoid those that are not so good) you can find an important document here: Training Information