So You Want a Job in Recreation

So You Want a Job in Recreation?
A Reality Check of our Field

by Karen I. Shragg Ed.d.

Having a career in recreation has a great ring to it. It sounds like so much fun. I’ve been teased about college courses I must have taken in order to get my job. Titles like “Under Water Basket Weaving,” “How to Run Bingo Games for Seniors, and the like. I’ve also had people tell me how lucky I am to work in a place where people come to have fun. I always agree. But how do we tell them our secret? What is our secret? That we all put in some incredible hours to accomplish often Herculean tasks of jobs that would be assigned to at least a dozen more people in any other profession. It is also not well known that we really are professionals who have gone to real universities taking professional classes that we rely on in order to be trained for the job we do.

The other side of the secret is that we could never be adequately prepared for what we are asked to do in our coveted positions. If we were adequately prepared, our university class descriptions would sound something like this:

Recreation 101: How to juggle the demands of running new special events while completing your regular schedule with no additional staff. Or Recreation 102:
How to advertise your new programs to new audiences with no new money for advertising. Recreation 103 might sound something like: How to convince your spouse that it would be fun to work on real holidays and take comp time next year for them.

From special event planning to meeting with neighborhoods in preparation for a new park design, our jobs in recreation test the boundaries of 80 hour two week pay periods more often than not.

One of the reasons we are not unionized is probably because union bosses would snarl at the thought of having its members required to get up at 3 am to get a marathon off the ground. They’d march right to city hall to complain about how we had to spend 16 hours on a Saturday making sure Halloween happened for thousands of guests.

In our profession, we work to make people enjoy their holidays. That means we’ll be spending our Fourth of July, on the back of a float waving to parade goers while promoting our friend’s group. New Year’s Eve means you’ll be hiking in snow up to your thighs putting out luminaries instead of going out with your friends. Easter will find you up to your eyeballs in plastic eggs and chocolate.



In this field we are challenged with providing engaging experiences for people of all ages in a wide variety of activities with small budgets. That means we call on all of our relatives and friends to help us with our special events, offering to feed them and give out volunteer t-shirts as our eternally grateful thank you in exchange for their generous offer of time


So you want a job in recreation? That’s terrific, it’s a great field with many daily rewards. I know I wouldn’t want a career in anything else. It’s just that it would be nice to retire the idea that we don’t work very hard or that it doesn’t take a college degree to do our jobs. Once the word is out, we’ll be teased less and respected more. The public will better understand what it took to put in the skate park, run the sandcastle building contest and put on that Memorial Pay picnic for thousands. The complaints, though not many, would all but vanish if they just knew even a little bit about all the meetings, phone calls, emails, volunteer coordination and physical work it took to pull off even one of our yearly goals.

How do we tell them all that goes into our secret without sounding like we are whining? We’re not about to do that. We’re too busy trying to hold our programs together in tough budget times when what we do is perceived to be non-essential services.

We know the value of what we do, how we serve a public with activities that enriches their lives, that’s why we do what we do, and put in the hours that is required to get the job done. We know at the end of some very long days, the world is a better place because there was a new ball field to play on, a new dance class to take and a summer camp to attend.

We know that recreation deserves a better stature in society for the way we keep kids engaged in meaningful after school activities and give families wholesome inexpensive things to do on weekends. We know that recreation provides immeasurable benefits that greatly influence the quality of life in our communities. But we’re not telling, that’ll be up to you.