Career Strategy for Dancers
Career Strategy for Dancers is an mini-course designed to help dancers step back, get clarity, and make intentional choices about their work, finances, time, and energy—without burning out, selling out, or feeling constantly behind.
This course is not about chasing a single “dream job” or following a rigid path.
It’s about learning how to think strategically so you can adapt, pivot, and make aligned decisions across different seasons of your life.
This course is not focused on the skills you need to get dance jobs but instead we focus on how to build a freelance or multi-stream career by identifying complimentary areas and opportunities.
Other people offer courses on reels, audition prep, and outreach but those skills are genre specific. All dancers need to understand the intersections of multiple income streams, personal strengths, and generating opportunities and that’s where this course comes in.
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Module 1
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Lesson 1: Clarifying What Matters
This lesson introduces the course and reframes career planning for dancers as a flexible, values-based process rather than a single permanent decision.
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Lesson 2: Defining Life Values
This lesson helps you identify your core values and understand how they should guide both your artistic and financial choices.
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Lesson 3: The Dance Witness
This lesson focuses on recognizing your strengths and transferable skills, including those developed through dance training.
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Module 2
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Module 3
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Lesson 1: Identifying Strengths and Alignments
This lesson introduces the quadrant exercise as a tool for expanding career possibilities based on what you enjoy and what you do well.
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Lesson 2: Mapping Possibilities
This video shows how to turn your strengths, interests, and curiosities into concrete career possibilities without judgment or commitment.
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Lesson 3: Workability
This video helps you reality-check your ideas by identifying which options are workable, accessible, and worth testing right now.
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Module 4
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Lesson 1: Aligning your Financial Health
This video connects your values and career choices to your finances by introducing a flexible budgeting system designed for dancers.
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Lesson 2: Budgeting in Seasons
This video reframes budgeting around seasons of life, helping you adjust financial strategies with compassion and realism.
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Module 5
Meet your instructor
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Meet your instructor ✳
Ashley
Ashley supports performing artists in building sustainable careers in and through the arts. As a Licensed Graduate Professional Counselor (#LGP13487) in Maryland and a dedicated advocate for dance and movement education, she brings a unique blend of academic expertise and student-centered guidance to her college consulting practice.
Ashley holds a PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University, an MEd in Counselor Education from the University of Virginia, and a BFA in Modern Dance from the University of Utah. Her professional background includes experiences as a dance artist, dance professor, and learning specialist across colleges, universities, and K–12 independent and international schools. While at Ohio State she was a member of the dance admissions committee.
Her work bridges academic planning, career development, and holistic support for students pursuing the performing arts.
Course FAQ
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Career Strategy for Dancers is an online course designed to help dancers build sustainable, flexible careers by aligning work choices with values, strengths, financial realities, and different seasons of life.
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This course is for early career dancers who want clarity around work, money, and long-term sustainability while balancing performing opportunities.
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This course is useful for pre-professional dancers, college dance majors, freelance artists, educators, and dancers exploring non-performance or dance-adjacent career paths.
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Yes. The course is specifically designed to help dancers who feel overwhelmed, burned out, financially stressed, or unsure how to move forward by offering realistic frameworks instead of pressure or hustle culture.
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The course helps you brainstorm and explore creative careers, dance-adjacent work, and non-dance sustaining jobs, including teaching, arts administration, nonprofit work, fitness, education, service industry roles, and other transferable skill-based paths.
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This is not a job placement program or certification. It is a strategy and decision-making course that helps dancers identify workable options and take next steps aligned with their lives.
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Yes. Career Strategy for Dancers includes budgeting tools designed specifically for dancers, including variable income budgeting, creative expense planning, and strategies for different financial seasons.
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The course is self-paced. While you can move through the material at your own speed and return to it as your career evolves—the course is designed to be done intensively in one day.
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This course does not push a single “right” path or define success narrowly. Instead, it acknowledges the realities of dance careers, variable income, multiple jobs, and changing seasons of life.