Cole Mize still remembers the camcorder. When he came through the PGA of America Education program as a student, the idea of a professional-grade camera being built into your phone was years away. Instead, documenting a golf lesson for review meant hoisting an old camera rig the size of a small suitcase onto your shoulder – and making edits meant cutting it out of VHS tape. And sometimes, the PGA Education course material he studied, as he recalls, wasn’t as current as it could have been.
“The education curriculum was more static back then,” says Mize, now a PGA of America Golf Professional who is both Director of Golf at the University of Idaho’s Vandal Golf Course in Moscow and Director of the PGA Golf Management Program at the university. “To have information that is constantly updated like it is now would have been a big difference.”
Mize and his peers now marvel at the transformation and evolution of PGA Education and the PGA Learning Strategy in recent years. The students he teaches today complete their hands-on work in a digital portfolio that artificial intelligence (AI) helps humans grade against a standard in a matter of hours. The curriculum refreshes itself in close to real time. And Associates who once took as long as eight years to finish the program are now completing it, on average, in under three.
“It is a night-and-day difference,” says Dr. Rich Ballinger, PGA, the PGA Education Committee Chair who also came up through the old business school version of the PGM Program himself before earning his PGA Master Professional credentials.
“From what I was prepared with coming out of the business school to what these students are prepared with now – they come out with so much more knowledge, so many more skills and abilities. It’s so much better designed around what today’s workforce requires.”
That overhaul did not happen in a vacuum. Over the last several years, in the middle of the biggest surge in golf participation in a generation, the PGA of America has rebuilt the way it educates incoming golf professionals. What was once a static body of coursework has become a dynamic, technology- driven ecosystem, designed to turn people with a passion for golf into high-impact business operators and to do it faster than ever before, without compromising the standard that gives PGA of America Membership its value.
“The expectations of employers keep going up. The expectations of consumers and golfers keep going up,” says PGA Master Professional Dawes Marlatt, PGA of America Senior Director of Education and Talent Development. “However, the capacity and capacities of our members are going up, too. Everybody’s getting better.”
The numbers tell the first part of the story. Golf boomed coming out of COVID, and it’s the younger generation that fueled it – the same generation now flooding into the profession that serves them.
“As we all know, golf has boomed since COVID, and it’s the younger generation that’s really fueled that growth,” says Ballinger, the founding Director of the PGA Golf Management Program at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and the national 2021 PGA of America Professional Development Award recipient. “We’re seeing a lot of young people who are very interested in the game and want to make it a career. Post-boom, there was a real demand for people in the industry – our PGA Professionals were crying for help. ‘We need more people; we need more assistant professionals.”
Filling that pipeline took the whole Association: boards, committees, Sections and the Education team all pulling in the same direction. But Ballinger is quick to point out that recruiting was only half the assignment.
“The PGA of America wanted not only to recruit but to retain them,” he says. “I think that’s where PGM 3.1 has done some great things. It was designed with the adult learner in mind. It’s online, quiz-based, career path-specific and self-paced. And we’ve been able to do all of that without sacrificing the standard. That’s extremely important to me and to the committee.”
For Marlatt, the engineering problem behind that growth comes down to three things PGA of America Members and Associates care about most.
“They want time, cost and convenience to be in balance,” he says. “How can we do it quickly without reducing our standards? After all, they want to make sure they can get the best job and the best compensation at the moment that makes sense to them, and they want a quality education.”
On cost, the PGA of America has actually pushed in the opposite direction of inflation. Member education, Marlatt says, is now very affordable at $350 for a year of access, and the price of continual improvement has been driven down rather than up. On convenience, the team has resisted the temptation to simply move everything online because it would be more expedient. The discipline, he says, is in the balance, with Level 1 happening online before prospective PGA Associates convene at the Home of the PGA of America in Frisco, Texas, for Levels 2 and 3.
“We could say we’ll just do it all virtually. That’s convenient, but it might not be what members desire,” Marlatt says. “Or we could say everything has to be in person because that’s what we believe they want, and then we lose some of them because it doesn’t fit their busy schedules in a world filled with chaos and compression. The balance between both requires discipline.”
The clearest proof of that balance is in the calendar. At the beginning of the decade, Associates had up to eight years to finish the program. Plenty of them were running out the clock, getting stale and stagnant in the process. Today, the average Associate completes the program in roughly three years, with some finishing in under a year. There are more than 11,000 individuals in the pipeline right now, and enrollment has hit record highs four years running.
“The longer it takes to get through the program, the less relevant the learning will be,” Marlatt says. “If you’re in a training program and you take five years to get through Level 1, are you going to carry that into Level 2? It became a priority to make education more efficient. And everything we do from an adult-learning perspective is learned by doing, all applied on the job.”
The structure that makes the speed possible is straightforward. After a Qualifying Level that introduces the fundamentals of the profession, candidates move through three levels of coursework, seminars and portfolio work. Level 1 is now entirely virtual – same content for everyone, no travel required – while Level 2 and 3 seminars are completed in person in Frisco. That single change removed a mountain of geographic and logistical friction without removing the hands-on, instructor-led experience that the in-person seminars deliver.
From his seat at the University of Idaho, where he’s now in his 20th year and serves as PGM Education Association President, Mize has watched the new model change the rhythm of how students move through their work. And the same goes for students in PGA Golf Management University Programs or through the PGA Associate Program.
“That continuous feedback loop is really helpful to keep students engaged,” Mize says. “So, as they’re working through one of the modules – let’s say business planning – they’re receiving that feedback not only from us on the university side as professors, but they’re getting it from the PGA of America, as well. That helps them really see progress. It’s way more efficient and motivating than the crash courses our students used to take just to prepare for the end-of-level testing, the battery of testing. This has definitely sped up the progress our students make.”
Marlatt knows the relentless pace of change isn’t to everyone’s taste – he’s been told as much, more than once.
“Someone recently said we’re changing things too much,” Marlatt recalls. His view is that the criticism gets the responsibility backward.
“If we can make adjustments in real time, and we have the ability, then we have the responsibility,” he adds.
