It’s the question we’re asked most often, and it usually comes early — sometimes in the first two minutes of a phone call.
The answer is yes. We have a job board with current openings from employers around Chicago, we make introductions, and our graduates move into the graduate clinic at River North Massage Therapy Center. Placement is a real part of what we do.
But it isn’t the whole answer, and we’d rather give you the whole answer.
A License Doesn’t Tell You What to Do With It
Here is what we have watched happen for more than twenty years. Two people finish the same program. Same instructors, same hours, same license, same city. Five years later one of them has built a career and the other has left the profession.
The difference usually isn’t talent. There are therapists with wonderful hands who never build anything, and therapists with merely good hands who thrive. What separates them is that one of them knew what they were actually after, and the other took the first job that appeared because it was there.
Placement can hand you a job. It cannot tell you whether that job is the right one for you — whether you want the steadiness of employment or the freedom of your own practice, whether you want to work with athletes or with people in pain or with people who are simply exhausted, whether you need forty hours a week or twelve. Nobody can answer those questions for you. But you can answer them for yourself, and it is far easier to do that before you are standing in front of a job offer.
So We Start With Where You Are
The first session of our professional development segment does not begin with resumes or interviews. It begins with an exercise called the Wheel of Life.
You name six to eight parts of your life that genuinely matter to you. Career, money, health, family, whatever yours happen to be. Then you rate how content you are in each one, right now, honestly, on a scale of zero to ten. When you connect the marks you get a picture of your life, and most people’s picture is not a smooth circle. It has flat spots.
Two things about that picture are worth sitting with.
The first is that it reflects how you feel, not how your life looks from the outside. Someone else might think your money situation is fine. That doesn’t matter. How you feel about it is what shapes what you do next.
The second is that what you are looking at is a set of results. Those results came from somewhere — from actions, which came from habits, which came from patterns you may never have examined. Which means they can change, but not by trying harder at the same things.
Once you can see that clearly, the career questions get easier. You know which flat spot you are actually trying to fix. And a job that fills it looks very different from a job that merely pays.
Where the Exercise Comes From
We first met the Wheel of Life through Tony Robbins and other business coaching, years before massage. We were glad to find it again in Cherie Sohnen-Moe’s Business Mastery, which has been a staple in massage programs for a long time. The exercise itself is older than any of us and belongs to nobody.
What is ours is what we built around it — awareness first, then vision, then strategy, and the career plan our students construct across the rest of the segment.
Try It Yourself
We built the exercise as a tool anyone can use, free, with no signup:
Nothing you type is sent anywhere. There is no account, no email, no server — your answers stay in your browser until you save them to a file you keep. We cannot see them, and that is deliberate. The exercise only works if you are honest, and people are not honest when someone is watching.
Do it whether or not you ever call us. It takes about fifteen minutes and it is worth the fifteen minutes.
And Yes, the Job Board
Once you know what you are looking for, it helps to see what is out there. Our job board carries current openings from employers around Chicago:
New School for Massage Job Board
Have a look. It is a fair picture of what this profession actually asks of you — which is useful whether you are already enrolled somewhere or still deciding.
About New School for Massage Bodywork & Healing
New School for Massage Bodywork & Healing is a state-approved massage therapy school in Chicago, Illinois, with more than 1,500 graduates. We provide massage therapy education, continuing education, and clinical training designed to prepare students for successful careers in the profession. Learn more on our Admissions page or contact our admissions team.