Introduction and guidance
This free badged course, The athlete’s journey: transitions through sport, lasts 24 hours, with eight ‘sessions’. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete a further study session. The eight sessions are linked to ensure a logical flow through the course. They are:
- The athlete’s journey − what are career transitions in sport?
- Influencing factors − key themes in the athlete’s journey
- Out of the blocks − preparing athletes for career transitions
- Keeping going − expected transitions in sport
- Stopped in your tracks − unexpected transitions in sport
- Spotlight − parenthood and sport
- The final athletic chapter − retirement from sport
- Moving on − life after sport.
This course will develop your confidence and skills for online study, whether this is to explore sport and exercise topics or as part of your preparation for other study.
You’ll begin in the first two sessions with a general overview of career transitions in sport, drawing on your own experiences and those from case study examples, before moving on to look in more detail at some of the key transitions athletes will face and the associated challenges.
Case studies and audio-visual examples are used to help explain concepts and you’ll get plenty of opportunities to demonstrate your new understanding and practise your study skills.
Part of this practice will be the interactive quizzes, of which Sessions 4 and 8 will provide you with an opportunity to earn a badge to demonstrate your new skills. You can read more on how to study the course and about badges in the next sections.
After completing this course, you should be able to:
- understand what career transitions in sport are
- identify the main challenges associated with career transitions in sport
- recognise how best to prepare athletes for career transitions
- identify the impact of different transitional episodes on athletes.
Moving around the course
In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each session, you will find a link to the next session. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Full course description’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course.
It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.
The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.