Aims
By invitation only, the WRU Level 5 coaching course is more of a bespoke professional development programme looking for cutting edge knowledge from a board perspective of management and leadership to provide a wider and deeper level of understanding of the coaching process for the candidates involved. It is more about dissemination and sharing of information than formal qualification.

Course members will be selected coaches in the professional game in Wales plus invited skills coaches and club coaches from Premier Division level. The coaches will be exposed to and encouraged to embrace concepts of management from other sporting fields as well as the business domain.

Level 5 provides and encourages the following:

Executive Coaching: Course members will be subject to intensive focussed mentoring with a personal mentor available to discuss any issues arising from the coaching process. The demands on the modern coach are far greater than ever before due to professionalism, larger coaching teams, more time with the modern professional players, more learning / educational provision and opportunities, greater accountability and greater employer and public expectations so a one-to-one coaching of the coach can help develop the Level 5 Coach and assist them with advice in difficult times.

30 coaches are assigned an executive coach who will work closely with them for 12 months. This provision will involve meeting up about five times a year, exchanging e-mails and / or just being at the end of a telephone, so that issues, concerns, problems and development needs can be shared in a confidential way with someone who possesses the appropriate skills and cares passionately about maximising.

Professional Coaching Development Programme: Involving academics from a wide variety of backgrounds the CPD for coaches provides a series of lecture topics governing coaching and management ethos followed by a series of 24hr workshops.

Observation: WRU Level 5 course members are put on week long observation with the Wales National Squad during the period of their course. For each Wales game, two Level 5/4 Course Members will join up with the Wales National squad and observe all aspects of the week-long training camp running up to a game. If the game is played at home, the course members stay until the end of the match, if the game is away, they leave the camp before the team depart to the away venue.

Conferencing: Course members are selected to attend various conferences to ensure cross-referencing of the coaching process with other cultures; disseminating, sharing and learning coaching techniques.

Each year, selected candidates attend the World Coaching Conference with the aim of looking to identify transferable skills from across the sporting world in the form of two courses (2.5 days and 1.5 days) across a week.

Also, each year, six course members attend the Six Nations Coaching Conference, where each group of six course members attending from a union are split across six tables where the other five groups attending from other unions are split similarly. In effect, six tables, with six nationalities on each table enabling a cross-cultural debate on the issues discussed.

Outcomes: The WRU Level 5 coaching course provides candidates with an intensive cross-cultural elite end coaching programme leaving the candidate empowered by a broad experience of the role of coaching and management.