I work as an instructor and coach for New Generation Verbier and coach the following courses;
Other – A law degree!
My name is Jon Ahlsén and I work for New Generation in Verbier, where I spend about half my time teaching the general public and the remainder coaching other instructors. I am fully qualified in BASI and NZSIA. I have converted into the Swiss system and I’ve dabbled in the Canadian system. That might seem excessive, but I had good reasons when I did the exams. In the “summer” I work closely with instructors from Austria, several of them examiners for the Austrian full cert, some of them Austrian Demo Team members. I grew up ski racing to a decent level in Sweden.
Well, there were practical reasons that took me down a winding path (chronological order): ski racing, quit skiing, university for seven (!) years, lawyer for nine years, retired from law, gap course in Canada and a financial crisis that decreased the number of available visas in Canada, another gap course in New Zealand, work in Zermatt, work at Treble Cone (New Zealand), work in Verbier…
Now, I see a lot of benefit in all those qualifications. They have broadened my understanding of skiing and helped me distill what’s actually important in the sport. I try to keep things simple, and believe it or not, my background as a lawyer actually helps. Successful people in any field figure out a few key concepts and focus on them to produce results. I try to do that when I coach.
Hard work pays off, whether it’s for myself or a skier I coach. For me personally, the time I’ve devoted to my skiing and my analytical eye since walking away from my legal career has gotten me selected to the NZSIA demo team and landed me a coaching job for our gap course as well as our six week in-house level 4 training program in Verbier. Nowadays, my favorite work days involve me standing at the bottom of a run, the trainees lapping around and me seeing progress in almost every go.
One great thing about working with your passion is that you’re never done. I don’t have as much time as I used to, but I’m still working hard on my skiing. I hurt my left knee in a tumble a couple of years ago and picked up some bad habits while trying to protect that knee. I’ve been working for about a year and a half trying to get rid of them, and these last couple of weeks I’ve come across a couple of ideas that seem to work for me. We’ll see if something sticks.
Becoming a ski instructor may seem a daunting task and the variety of courses available certainly does not make it any easier, but here at New Generation we have more than a decades experience running ski instructor training courses and during that time we have come across most situations, problems and questions.
We are available 7 days a week and will be able to guide you through all steps of the BASI system, at every level. So contact us today and find out more.
Note: If you contact us regarding a specific course we can also send you a full brochure, so don’t forget to enter your address details.
