PGA Excel offers PGA Members the chance to illustrate their impact and achievement in the golf industry.
Our Association’s flagship assessment framework allows Members to rise through the titles of Advanced, Fellow, Advanced Fellow and Master across the Professional, Coach and Manager specialisms.
However, not only do applicants need to showcase your career progress, but you should also present it in a way that impresses the markers and includes concrete evidence to prove your impact in the industry.
Understanding how to present facts and numbers and gradually keeping note of each step of your career are among the most vital elements which make a strong Excel application.
We asked a PGA Excel marker to specifically outline mistakes that Members make in PGA Excel applications and how to build an application that ticks every box.
Understand the criteria for each designation
It's about a realistic understanding of where you are.
If you happened to be very good at your job, but your whole profile is within a club environment, you're never going to get much beyond Advanced.
If your influence is on a regional level, and you’re influencing the industry within that framework, then you’re looking at Fellow to Advanced Fellow.
If your influence is over a national, international level, and you’re developing the next generation, then you’re looking at Advanced Fellow to a Master Professional.
That is a simplistic way to look at it, but it holds accurately in being able to assess where somebody is and puts things into a framework.
Provide evidence – then quantify the evidence
When you fill out your self-assessment and tell me a story, it's all qualitative. I can't mark something based on qualitative feedback.
I can see the hard facts, but you also need to back up a good story with any data that I can get to grips with.
It is important to quantify results – but be sure you’re giving me data that relates to what it is you are trying to demonstrate.
If I see ‘I took over as Head Professional at a golf club and sales increased by 70%’ – that's fine, but I don't know where your starting point was.
Within a 500-member club, you might start retail at £140,000 but you’ve grown it to £180,000. Now I know you're better than average.
Now I start to benchmark you, because you can demonstrate when you first went there, there were 500 members. You went on this course to look at social media engagement and engage members and provide better customer service. Then you took that information and insight to the club and put a plan together.
Now I want to see the evidence of what you did: a marketing campaign; a face-to-face engagement campaign; a temporary membership scheme that offered a discount in the bar to make them feel like members.
For example, over the course of 12 months, you had 200 people in the front door, and you converted 140 of them into membership and the membership is now 640.
Track career progress as you go along
It’s a CV in many ways. Every year you go back, what have you done last year? How can you update the CV to make yourself relevant? Because then you've got it ready should a role come up that you want – you can just go bang, there it is.
The longer you leave something and have to reflect back, the hazier the details become. It's always important to make notes as you go along.
How to structure evidence clearly and concisely
You can do facts in bullet points. It doesn't need to be a story. I just need some facts.
Whatever it is, I can start to see the influence. You've done courses, articles, or CPD workshops. You're influencing regionally or nationally.
The impact was 500 new members, and X amount of income (for example). It can just be bullet points, and that's backing up the original story.
Don’t get bogged down too much in telling the story. You just need to set the scenario and tell me the impacts and the influence, and always think about it strategically: is my influence local? Is my influence county/regional? Is my influence regional/national? Is my influence national/International?
You can use a range of documents for PGA Excel
Attach PDFs, Word documents and photos. This is the story with some hard facts, and from a business point of view, here are my financial accounts, here's my profit-loss, here's my marketing campaign. Demonstrate it to me so I can see it.
Testimonials are a nice addition, especially for coaches.
We live in an age of social media, so all you coaches are on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. If they're really having a wider influence, what are your numbers? What do they look like and how have you grown them?
