Scuba Diving Education: Not A Commodity

Discounted classes, on-line training and the lack of performance requirements in training agency standards are diluting the belief that it is the instructor, not the agency/dive store, that makes a class good or bad. As scuba diving education moves into the 21st century, there is a very large danger that scuba training is being viewed as a commodity.

Why Scuba Training Shouldn’t Be A Commodity?

I grew up on a farm, so I am familiar with what many good farmers go through when trying to get top dollar for their crops. Let me give you an example of how this applies to scuba training. Two farmers grow corn. One farmer spends a lot of money to fertilize their crops and improve their fields for moisture control and erosion prevention in order to grow good, quality corn. The farmer down the street does not do anything to improve the quality of their corn. When it comes time for both farmers to sell their crops, both get paid the same as the price of corn is driven by the market demand, not by quality. So the farmer who spent a lot of time to grow great corn gets screwed, while the farmer who took shortcuts and produced mediocre corn gets paid the same.

This is where scuba training is moving towards. The demand from non-divers are driving the price down on scuba training because they are not aware that all scuba training is NOT equal. Many of the main stream dive training agencies are promoting scuba diving as a very easy, risk-free activity to participate in. Thus feeding into the belief that any scuba class will be fine to learn to scuba dive. Every dive training agency now offers on-line scuba diving classes. This now removes the instructor from the classroom, where students get their first experience with the instructor.

So, an instructor who continually tries to improve his classes and increase his own diving capacity, like this great technical diving instructor, will have an up hill battle to gain footing against those wishing to promote mediocracy. Just like the farmer doing his best to provide great corn, the scuba diving instructor who tries to provide higher than average dive training gets ostracized by the diving “industry”.

How to Prevent Scuba Training from Becoming a Commodity

In my opinion, in order to grow the scuba training industry, new and prospective divers need to be educated on the differences between scuba instructors/dive stores. Since many perspective scuba divers are using the internet to research scuba diving, we can use forums such as Facebook, Twitter, and internet forums such as Scubaboard (and others) to spread the word about differences in instructional abilities and what to look for in different types of scuba diving classes. When people start to search out the best quality classes, then the scuba industry will start to get better. We’ll see better trained divers and our underwater world will thrive.

Dive Safe,
Duane
Precision Diving