For obtaining the Level 1 certificate Horse experience is required. You don't have to be a competition rider or a professional trainer, but you must be sufficiently familiar with horses to be able to work with them safely and independently.

In Level 1 and Level 2, we focus on handling horses within coaching situations, safety, body language, boundaries, and equine welfare, assuming a solid foundation of experience with horses. Therefore, those with limited horse experience will need to invest extra time and money, alongside the training, in learning how to handle horses and understand equine behavior before the certificate can be awarded. During the intake, we assess your level of horse experience and determine if it is suitable.

De Basic module which consists of the Nature of Wisdom program can be followed without horse experience.

With the Eponaquest Level 1 certificate you can start working independently as a coach with horses.

This means that you can professionally apply the Eponaquest approach in coaching programs, personal development, leadership development, team development, or related forms of guidance.

However, the Level 1 certificate does not automatically make you a therapist. If you wish to work therapeutically with horses, you also need recognized training or registration as a therapist, psychosocial therapist, psychologist, or similar professional.

The Eponaquest training is intended for existing therapists as an additional specialization: you learn how to use equine therapy carefully, safely, and in accordance with international best-practice standards when working with your clients.

Graduates use the program in very different ways. This depends on their background, experience, target group, and professional direction.

Examples of fields of work in which graduates are active:

• leadership development and team coaching;
• personal development and coaching with horses;
• stress, burnout, and resilience coaching;
• career coaching;
• guidance of clients with a personal budget or via care farms;
• psychosocial or therapeutic guidance, provided someone also has the appropriate prior education for this;
• guidance on themes such as high sensitivity, boundaries, relationships, parenthood, or self-confidence;
• social and community work;
• education, youth work or student guidance;
• combinations with holistic forms of treatment such as craniosacral therapy, osteopathy or fascia therapy;
• and – certainly not least: in combination with riding lessons, horse training, or instruction.

The program therefore does not offer a standard “one-profession” route. Rather, it forms a solid professional foundation with which you can develop your own practice or specialization, depending on your background.

Upon completion of Level 1, you can join, among others, the Professional Association for and by Horse Coaches. This professional association represents horse coaches from various training programs and professional focus areas. Several Eponaquest certificate holders are members of their own accord and are actively involved in the board of this professional association. 

Which other registrations are appropriate or possible depends on your educational background and the type of work you wish to do. Different frameworks apply to coaching, psychosocial counseling, therapeutic work, education, healthcare, or leadership development.

For registered therapists, it is generally the case that they register their sessions with horses under their existing therapeutic profession, not as a separate form of “equine therapy”.

Horse coaching is an unregulated profession in the Netherlands. This means that for most applications, there is no legally protected title or mandatory professional registration required to work as a horse coach.

However, you may not therapy with horses offer unless you are also trained and registered as a therapist.

Precisely because it is a liberal profession, we believe it is important that students receive thorough training in, among other things, safety, ethics, body awareness, emotional intelligence, and the highest professional standards for good guidance and horse welfare.

Recognition, a diploma, or accreditation alone is not an automatic guarantee of good quality. The way someone works in practice, seeks supervision, continues to learn, and handles clients and horses with care is at least as important.

Eponaquest Coaches and Instructors commit to best practice guidelines that define what we understand by quality.

Currently, horse coaching or equitherapy is not reimbursed as a separate form of treatment by health insurers in the Netherlands.

In some situations, funding is possible through other routes, such as municipal facilities, care budgets, or a personal budget (PGB). This depends heavily on the client's situation, the municipality, the indication, and the support worker's background.

Registered therapists who utilize horses within their existing therapeutic work generally bill under their own professional registration and treatment type.

The program is accredited by Eponaquest LLC, Linda Kohanov's international training program in Arizona. Linda Kohanov is considered one of the pioneers in the field of horse coaching and equine-facilitated learning.

The Eponaquest training has existed for more than 25 years and was developed in collaboration with psychotherapists, coaches, management experts, and equine trainers. The method is based on international best-practice standards for professional guidance with horses.

Currently, no additional Dutch accreditations are required to work as a horse coach. 

A developing field

In the Netherlands and abroad, there is increasing talk about the further formalization of the field of equine coaching. This has important advantages, such as greater recognition, professionalization, and clearer quality criteria.

At the same time, accreditation of equine coaching also has significant disadvantages. Currently, for our program, these outweigh the advantages slightly. Below you will find the main bottlenecks we observe in the current situation regarding the accreditation of coaching with horses.

Accreditation is expensive and not always necessary

Meeting accreditation standards often requires intensive bureaucratic processes, increases the administrative burden for educators, and makes study programs more expensive. It can also make enrollment and graduation procedures slower and more complicated.

For the professional purposes of many of our students, accreditation is optional because they already hold the necessary diplomas or accreditations within their field and are taking the course as continuing education. For most participants who wish to offer forms of training and coaching, accreditation is not mandatory. 

Accreditation is no guarantee of safety

A significant risk is that accreditation can create a false sense of security. Particularly in a field involving work with large live animals, professional safety always remains dependent on what happens in the moment.

No quality mark can predict or prevent a horse's flight behavior. Calming a startled horse requires a handler who remains grounded, can regulate tension, and can act decisively.

Therefore, Eponaquest places great emphasis on personal development, body awareness, and the coach/facilitator's ability to regulate their own nervous system; and on working safely and in a horse-friendly manner. Coaches must first learn to understand the impact of this work and its requirements themselves before they learn to professionally guide others with horses. In practice, we see that precisely this emphasis is one of the most valued characteristics of Eponaquest among our students. 

Quality requires more than standard rules

Accreditation is not mandatory for most trainers and coaches. Bodies that award quality marks for coaching and training are private organizations established by the field itself. Only a very small number of organizations are active in the Dutch market that accredit a wide range of coach training programs.

In contrast, therapy, as a protected professional activity, is legally very strictly controlled, registered, and accredited.

In both coaching and therapy, this can reduce the actual quality and innovativeness of treatment methods to the detriment of the client:

• Long waiting lists and ever-increasing costs for regular therapy within an overburdened healthcare system are one of the main disadvantages for healthcare clients of the heavy regulatory burden in healthcare;
• A major risk in coaching is that training programs (and therefore coaches) become increasingly similar when they all have to conform to the accreditation frameworks and rules of only one or two of the same bodies.

Especially small-scale, experience-based, and innovative training programs are often disproportionately burdened or even excluded by standard procedures that do not always align well with working with horses, body-oriented learning, or intensive personal guidance.

In our view, accreditation should therefore not only consider the quality of study programs, but also whether the procedures are fair, proportionate, and appropriate for various forms of learning and guidance. In this regard, regulatory frameworks must provide sufficient scope for innovation and deliberate small-scale approaches.

There is (yet) no suitable comprehensive quality mark

Currently, quality marks primarily exist for specific components of the field. Some assess the quality of coaching or therapy, while others focus on student supervision, the educational organization, or animal welfare.

There is currently no independent quality mark that assesses the combination of professional guidance, training people, and responsible work with horses as a whole. This means that if you want to fully accredit a horse coach training program, you must maintain multiple quality marks simultaneously, and therefore invest a great deal of time, money, and attention in keeping up with all kinds of different, sometimes conflicting, requirements and standards.

We prefer to invest that time, energy, and attention in our students and use the money to enable more experiential practice time with horses within the program. The Eponaquest program is one of the few horse coaching programs where you spend more than 50% of the time actively practicing in the field, rather than attending theory classes. 

Eponaquest Netherlands is, of course, closely following developments regarding accreditation. Should such a comprehensive quality mark for horse coaching be introduced, we certainly wish to contribute to and participate in it. For now, we choose to ensure that our internal quality benchmark meets best practice standards in all these areas: professional coaching, student supervision, training quality, safety, and horse welfare.

What if accreditation becomes mandatory?

Should accreditation become mandatory for the profession of equine coach in the future, we will comply and ensure that such accreditation is designed to be fair, realistic, and inclusive, and does not exclude methods proven in practice.

We will also endeavor to give existing certificate holders the opportunity to comply with any new requirements.