November 5, 2025
Does Experience Really Matter? Podcast Episode #315
In this special solo episode of Ask the Doulas, co-host and Gold Coast Doulas CEO Kristin Revere explores an important question: Does experience really matter when hiring a birth or postpartum doula? Kristin shares her insights on what families should truly consider when choosing doula support—beyond years in the field. Tune in for a thoughtful discussion on training, personality fit, intuition, and the many ways a doula can make a difference in your birth and postpartum journey.
Hello, hello! This is Kristin with Ask the Doulas, and I have a special solo episode today brought to you by Ceres Chill, a company that never stops working to make the lives of parents easier. Whether you’re looking for a game-changing breastmilk chiller, color-changing nipple shields, or 100% nontoxic glass bottles, this company has everything you need and want.
So let’s get into our topic today: does experience matter for birth doulas, postpartum doulas, educators? The topic has been coming up in my doula certification organization that I trained and certified through for birth and postpartum and several other certifications, and it has gotten me thinking. At Gold Coast, we’ve kind of handled that objection of inexperience in a different way, and it might be helpful for our listeners when selecting a doula or feeling overwhelmed by the process to understand what exactly goes into a doula’s training, education, background, and ability to support families. Since I matchmake all of our potential clients and students with the perfect doula or educator, and I also interview doulas and other team members and try to make sure that they’re a good fit for the core values of our company, which is professionalism and putting the client and their needs as a priority and continued education and giving back to the community. Those are some of our core values, and I want our doulas to share in those and really focus on caring for clients and giving that professional, unbiased support that I feel is valuable.
So as far as whether you should hire a doula who’s worked for 15 years or a doula who has attended a handful of births or maybe had their first postpartum client – it’s all up to you. For birth experience, our new birth doulas are always paired with a seasoned birth doula who is at our advanced level and has years and years of experience. And so they have a mentor for the interviews and the postpartum visit, the prenatal visit, and the text support all through pregnancy and virtual support during the labor. If they’ve tried every position or an intervention comes up or they have questions about feeding and just don’t have the personal experience or the full understanding of what to do next, they are guided by a seasoned doula.
When I started Gold Coast, I used to pair two new birth doulas together or would give a family a newer postpartum doula, and they wouldn’t often get hired that way because they’d be asked how many births they’d attended in the past, or there were other concerns about inexperience, even with the lower rate that I offer for new doulas versus our experienced doulas in the birth capacity. The more seasoned doulas were getting hired more frequently. And so I changed that and paired a seasoned doula with a new doula. But honestly, when it comes to a training, every training organization is different. So I look at professionalism and comprehensive support. With postpartum doulas, it’s about understanding the focus on not just mothering the mother but newborn care and the aspects of that and how to support with overnight care.
So we tend to hire from select organizations or make sure there are additional trainings, like being a certified lactation consultant to have additional feeding background or a newborn care specialist in addition to a postpartum doula certification if that training does not include newborn care. And so most certifications include auditing a breastfeeding class, auditing a comprehensive childbirth class, getting certified in CPR and first aid for both infants and adults, and of course, doing either virtual or in-person instruction, and those can range from two days to five days, and usually the days are ten-hour days. I know for my first birth doula training, it was four and a half days, and then I went home and took additional classes, like the breastfeeding class, the five-week childbirth class. I audited HypnoBirthing, for example. And so I had additional experience to offer. And I look for that with my doulas.
I also supplement education and bring in trainers that I pay for to give my team options for different experiences. I’ve brought in disability trainers, DEI trainers, a NICU nurse to train us on supporting NICU families. I’ve brought in a trainer to support plus size individuals in both the birth and postpartum phase. So doulas on my team have access to not only taking paid trainings for themselves to develop themselves professionally, but to have that mentoring.
And then our postpartum doulas all have chat groups in a communication platform that we use, as well as all of our birth doulas. So they’re able to reach out to each other if they’re dealing with a colicky baby or a baby with disabilities or how to navigate triplets. They can ask our team for advice, where a brand new solo doula who doesn’t have a network of supportive individuals or a good backup – we have backups in case of illness or emergency for our postpartum doulas, for our birth doulas. So yes, I do feel like experience matters, but having the training that equips doulas to be confident from their first day as a doula versus feeling like they need to hire a mentor and shadow them. I get calls quite frequently from other doulas who don’t work for me that want to shadow our clients in the home or shadow a birth, and that is not something that I believe would be needed with a comprehensive training. But I bring in doulas who have additional background in childcare, as a nanny, if it’s in that newborn focus or have been a childbirth educator for a while. So I look for related experience, and I look for professionalism. I look for reliability. But I also believe that with the right support, a brand new doula can be just as amazing as a doula who’s been with me for eight years, because they have the support. They have the training and the desire to help others. We are in a helping profession.
So it’s totally up to you if you are currently expecting or just had a baby and are looking for the perfect postpartum doula on what you want experience wise. And as I mentioned earlier, some doulas work on a reduced rate until they get experience or while they’re working through certifications. Others charge the same rate all throughout their career. I believe that we should increase rates over time, but again, we have a different rate structure for new doulas, knowing that they’re learning, that they’re getting mentoring, than we do for our most seasoned doulas. So our clients know if they want a doula who has attended a hundred births, that they’re going to pay more for that doula, or who has supported families over 200 hours, then they’re going to be able to select the right doula for them.
Other families just want a great personality fit and know that they have the training and the background that allows them to do a great job. And I say this often, but I still feel like at my first birth I attended or my first postpartum shift, I did as good of a job as I did at my tenth. I’ve certainly learned and experienced different scenarios over the years, but it is so heart-centered, and as long as you are passionate about it, focused, and properly trained, then I think our listeners who are newer doulas and are looking for confidence in mentoring, there are mentors out there that you can pay to get support if you haven’t joined an agency or a collective. There are so many different Facebook groups where doulas are offering paid mentoring or there are some online courses.
And then if you’re a client, again, weigh out the options of budget and personality and the experience that you’re desiring, and ask them questions about what additional trainings they’ve taken, what kind of support they have, if they have a mentor, if you’re unsure of hiring a new doula. It may be that they’ve taken all of these additional trainings that help equip them to better support you.
So good luck in your search, and we will be talking soon in our next episode.
IMPORTANT LINKS
Birth and postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas