By: Steven Appelbaum
ABC President & CEO
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of “What’s Waggin.”
It’s hard to believe that 2024 is half over, but here we are. Enrollments year to date are up over last year. Part of the reason for increased enrollments is our reduced tuition cost for some of our most popular programs. We understand how inflationary pressures make it harder for animal lovers to pursue their dreams of a career in the pet industry and are doing everything in our power to ease some of those financial challenges by keeping our prices low.
Our Alumni group continues to grow, and we are approaching 38,000 graduates. This always excites me because it speaks to the long-standing appeal of our programs. Has everyone who graduated from our program gone on to work in the pet industry? No, of course not, although when looking at the career trajectories of ABC graduates, the first thing we notice is that a surprising number of them never planned on working in the pet industry but instead use the knowledge and skills they learned through ABC to volunteer at rescues and shelters all across the continent. At this point, it’s all across the world, as I know of several who work(ed) at shelters/rescues in Japan, China, South Korea, Germany, France, and the UK. Aside from rescue volunteering, some graduates decide they would rather stay in their current non-pet related jobs but use what they learned at ABC to strengthen their relationship with their pets and help friends. Finally, a great many graduates work part-time in the pet industry. The truth is that the career paths of our graduates are varied and diverse, as they are. We have students from all walks of life, from those just out of high school and trying to figure out what they want to do as adults to retired folks looking to keep busy, give back, and establish secondary sources of income to supplement their golden years.
We’ve also worked with veterans, including those who participated in every conflict from World War II onward. For those of you who want to do the math on that last statement, remember the school started in 1998, and when I think of World War II vets, I can recall one gentleman who took our program in 2000 at 74. Like I said earlier, all walks of life.
While reflecting on our past is important, let’s also look forward to the future. Exciting changes are on the horizon at ABC.
First, we will launch a few new short-term programs in the next 6-12 months. We will share more about those when we get closer, but we believe they will have widespread appeal.
Second, we will revamp our Learning Management System (LMS) in the not-too-distant future. While this won’t impact graduates as much as students, Alumni who use the alumni center to review updated versions of our materials will find operations streamlined and much easier.
Third, we will also offer an online enrollment process, making it much easier for students to enroll in one of our programs.
Fourth, we are seriously exploring the impact AI could have on our programs. Some of the materials I’ve seen generated with AI are amazing. AI can allow us to add more visual aids, more narration, and less text reading, and it will generally enable the school to modernize how we disseminate information to our students. AI could also assist us in doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: translating our programs into other languages in a fraction of the time and effort.
Anyway, that’s it for now. I will keep everyone posted as things progress. Until then, keep cool, and remember that helping animals makes the world a better place.
