Why Your Lifeguards Have Had 60 Training Sessions and Zero Customer Service Training
By Craig Campbell | OpsPal | OpsExcellence
Ask any leisure centre manager how often their lifeguards train and they’ll tell you without hesitation. Monthly. Every month. It’s in the diary, it’s on the wall chart, and if it doesn’t happen the record is incomplete. Ask that same manager how often those same lifeguards receive customer service training — the skill they use on every single shift — and watch the silence.
In five years, a lifeguard attending monthly Ongoing Training and Competency Assessment (OTCA) sessions racks up around 60 training sessions for an emergency they hope never happens. OTCA is the RLSS UK’s structured monthly programme that keeps a lifeguard’s National Pool Lifeguard Qualification valid between renewals — scenario-based rescues, CPR, timed swims, NOP and EAP drills. It is right, it is necessary, and lives depend on it. The number of sessions in that same five years spent on how to greet a nervous first-timer, handle a complaint at the poolside, or turn a frustrated member into a loyal one? That’s usually zero. And we wonder why members leave.
This isn’t a criticism of pool safety. Monthly OTCA is non-negotiable. This is a challenge to how we define training in the first place. Because somewhere along the way, the leisure industry decided that training means compliance, and everything else is someone else’s problem.
The Lifeguard Is Your Customer Service Department
Let’s be clear about what a lifeguard actually does for the majority of their shift. They don’t perform rescues. They scan. They chat. They direct. They answer the same question about lane swimming thirty times a week with a smile — or they don’t, and that member quietly cancels their direct debit and joins the gym down the road.
Your lifeguards are the first face a nervous swimmer sees when they walk through the changing room door. They’re the ones who decide whether a child’s first lesson feels safe or overwhelming. They are, whether the job description says so or not, your frontline customer service team. And yet the training plan treats them as though their only job is the one emergency that happens once every several years — if at all.
The leisure and hospitality sector sees staff turnover of around 80%. Not all of that is down to training investment, but a meaningful chunk of it is. People don’t leave jobs — they leave places that don’t develop them. A lifeguard who joins your team at 18 and receives 60 safety sessions and nothing else hasn’t been developed. They’ve been maintained. There’s a difference.
What Does Your Induction Budget Look Like?
Here’s a question worth sitting with: how much of your training budget is specifically allocated to induction?
Not the fire safety video. Not the shadow shift on reception. Not the “read the NOP and sign here.” A proper induction — one that tells a new member of staff what great looks like, how to handle the difficult conversations, what the facility’s standards are, and why they matter. An induction that makes someone feel like they’ve joined somewhere worth staying.
For most leisure operators, the honest answer is that there isn’t one. There’s no induction budget line because nobody wrote one. And the reason nobody wrote one is that the assumption — unspoken, rarely questioned — is that staff will figure it out, or they’ll leave, and new ones will come along.
Consider the maths on that assumption. Replacing a staff member earning £25,000 costs over £30,000 when you factor in recruitment, lost productivity, and the time your managers spend covering gaps and getting someone new up to speed. That’s before you count the members who had a poor experience in the three months a new starter was finding their feet without any real guidance. The induction budget you don’t have is being spent anyway. You’re just spending it reactively and getting nothing back for it.
OpsExcellence — our free LinkedIn community for leisure professionals — tackles this exact gap. It exists because the industry needs somewhere to share what actually works, not just what the policy says. The conversations around induction, development, and building teams that stay are among the most active we have. If you’re not in there, you’re missing a room full of people who’ve already solved the problem you’re sitting with.
The Duty Manager Nobody Developed
The induction gap has a close relative, and it lives in your management team.
How does someone become a duty manager in a leisure centre? Usually, they’ve been there the longest, they’re reliable, and they’ve never caused any serious problems. So they get handed a set of keys and a radio and sent out to manage a team on a late Saturday shift.
What they rarely receive is any formal preparation for what that actually means. How to handle a safeguarding concern at 10pm when the manager has gone home. How to have a performance conversation with a colleague who’s also a friend. How to manage a pool evacuation and still make sure the parents at reception know what’s happening. How to debrief their team afterwards.
These aren’t instincts. They’re skills. And skills need to be taught. The leisure industry’s approach to duty manager development has historically been to assume that someone who’s good at the job they had will automatically be good at a completely different job. Sometimes that’s true. Often it isn’t, and the cost shows up in incident reports, member complaints, and staff who leave within six months of being promoted because nobody set them up to succeed.
Leicster, Leeds, Bristol — it doesn’t matter where. The pattern is consistent. The budget for developing a duty manager into a confident, capable shift leader is almost always zero. Because it isn’t in the OTCA spreadsheet.
Leisure Centre Staff Training That Works Every Day — Not Just in Emergencies
Here’s what changes when you treat staff development as business as usual rather than a line on a wish list.
When induction is structured and tracked, new staff know what’s expected from day one. Not just the fire exits and the pool rules — but what good looks like in the gym, at reception, poolside. When that content lives in a digital procedures library that staff can access on any device, a new starter at 6am on a Monday doesn’t have to wait for a manager to brief them. They can access exactly what they need, when they need it, and the system records that they’ve read and understood it.
With OpsPal, induction isn’t a one-off event you hope someone remembers. It’s a structured sequence — procedures, standards, and task acknowledgements — that a new member of staff works through at their own pace, with the training matrix showing their manager exactly where they are. When a procedure is updated, staff are notified and must acknowledge it. That’s not bureaucracy — that’s a daily standard that builds competence gradually and consistently, without anyone having to run a training day or bring in an external consultant every five years.
The customer service conversation doesn’t need a budget line if it’s embedded in how you write your procedures. What does a great poolside interaction look like? Put it in the standard. What’s the expectation when a member raises a concern? Put it in the procedure. Make it part of what your team reads, acknowledges, and is expected to deliver every shift.
This is what OpsExcellence is pushing for across the industry — not a grand training programme that costs a fortune and happens twice a decade, but a culture where development is part of normal operational life. Where the training matrix tracks customer-facing standards alongside first aid. Where a duty manager’s development pathway is as visible as their NPLQ renewal date.
The Absence of Data Should Tell You Something
One final point worth making. During research for this post, there was a specific attempt to find published data on how UK leisure operators split their training budgets between mandatory safety compliance and service or management development. There is almost nothing out there. No ukactive benchmark. No CIMSPA breakdown. No sector-wide analysis.
That absence is the answer. We can’t measure what we don’t invest in. And the industry has been too comfortable measuring training by the compliance deadline rather than by whether the people delivering your service are actually any good at it.
OpsPal’s training matrix doesn’t just track NPLQ renewals and first aid certificates. It gives you visibility across every qualification, every acknowledged procedure, every standard your team has confirmed they understand. It makes the full picture visible — not just the part with a legal deadline attached.
If you’ve made it this far and you’re nodding, the next step is simple. Take a look at what your training plan actually contains, and ask yourself how much of it prepares your team for the job they do every hour of every shift — not just the one they hope never comes.
You can join OpsExcellence on LinkedIn — it’s free, it’s run by leisure professionals for leisure professionals, and this kind of conversation is exactly what it’s there for.
If you’d like to see how OpsPal supports structured induction, staff development tracking, and procedures that build standards into daily operations, book a demo and we’ll show you what it looks like in practice.
Monday Morning Action
Pull up your training plan — or the closest thing you have to one — and count how many sessions in the last 12 months were about safety compliance, and how many were about developing your team’s service skills or management capability. You don’t need to send it to anyone. Just look at it. That number will tell you everything about where your priorities actually are, regardless of what the strategy document says.
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