From Pilates audition to a full career

Nobody gives you a script for your first Pilates audition. Your training taught you the exercises and how to teach them. It probably skipped what a studio is listening for during your sample class, what to say when someone names a rate, and which numbers you should be watching six months into the job. The Pilates Career Center was a two-hour workshop about that part of the work, taught by Holly Swanson at PLTS+ Collective in Austin.

Holly's own description puts it simply: your certification taught you to teach, but it didn't teach you what to expect at an audition, how to negotiate your pay, or what to track for yourself. The session is meant to take you from having a job as a Pilates teacher to having a full career in Pilates.

Who taught

Holly began teaching Pilates in 2002. She has owned and run Core Chicago Pilates through a recession and a pandemic, grown it to several locations, and co-founded The LAB, a 500-hour teacher training program. She also co-founded a practice that combines physical therapy and Pilates, and more recently Operating Well, which turns the systems her studios run on into tools for other boutique fitness owners. She shares the real numbers, the real struggles and the real discoveries of studio ownership, so teachers and owners can learn from what she has been through.

How the two hours run

You work through a workbook. It opens with your ideal client, which is harder to answer than it sounds. Then your personal brand voice and mission. It can feel a little fluffy right up until an owner across the desk asks why she should hire you, and you've got about one breath to answer. After that come job hunting and negotiation, and the last pages are about the numbers worth keeping an eye on after you're hired.

Holly saves the end for Q+A, which her description frames as a talk about your big dreams, the ideas you have and how you're going to get there. The workbook is meant to clarify your own answers, which tends to be more useful than notes on someone else's slides.

Before you walk into an audition

Holly covered this properly in Austin. Here are three things we'd think about before any audition. Take a class or two at the studio first and audition in their format, not your favorite sequence from another room. Have two numbers in your head before you walk in, the rate you'd like and the lowest you'd say yes to. And ask them something too, like how subs work or how often teachers get feedback, because an audition runs both ways.

The money conversation

Pay is the part most newer teachers dread, and the workshop names it outright: how to negotiate your pay, and strategies for finding and negotiating jobs. If you want a sense of the wider market first, our guide on how much Pilates instructors make pulls together the public figures we trust and explains what they leave out.

After the yes

Getting hired isn't the finish line. Tracking a few numbers of your own tells you whether a role is growing with you or quietly standing still. If filling classes and private sessions is your next worry, read our notes on how to get more Pilates clients.

When and where

The Pilates Career Center ran on Day 1 of PLTS+ Collective, Saturday, November 7, 2026, from 9:15 to 11:15 AM Central, at 1809 Pearl St, Austin, TX 78701. Holly also led the Day 2 session on breath mechanics and posture, and was on the program for Business + Anatomy in the virtual follow-up a month later. On Day 2 the professional panel picked up the career thread from another angle. The other workshops are on the PLTS+ Collective page.