Should Cert Cards be for life? My cert cards seem to be worthless!

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I have one family member who got certified, and several who did discover scuba. None continued diving. I have met a number of folks who got certified (often in college) but no longer dive. Not a one quit or did not go on because of a bad experience. Not a one did not enjoy the experience. One quit after several years due to the development of a medical issue. All enjoyed it and understand why I do it. BUT they did not enjoy it enough to invest a large amount of time and effort in it. They said that was neat and went on with their lives doing other neat things.

The fact is diving is expensive, it is equipment intensive, highly weather dependent, and you better like boat rides.
 
Once the prerequisite experience is obtained and a true Master Cert earned, a diver will need to maintain that cert annually, which includes a refresher of the basics. If the diver has logged 15 or 20 open water dives, fully documented, during the previous year, then the recert requirement is very basic. Otherwise, the diver with no or very few truly documentable dives (receipts and signed log by DM, instructor, buddy, Captain, and/or Company stamp) will be required to take an extensive refresher course in order to maintain the "Master Scuba Cert level."

If someone has 5 dives in 10 years and wants to go do <insert challenging dive here>, how is that my business?

flots
 
So you want to increase diver retention by requiring them to do, at the minimum, paperwork and at worst, do a course and pay money, every year?
 
Call me crazy but I think a lot of people stop diving because they never intended to make it a life's vocation in the first place.
They wanna try something new/cool and do it, enjoy it and then move on to the next new/cool thing.
Only a few think "this is what I want to do every weekend/vacation. This.. and nothing else".
 
Let's see, if you know it is a 70% dropout rate it seems that one could ask the dropouts instead of deciding why they left. Next it is blamed on poor training, but instead of discussing better initial OW training it now turns into a revolving mandatory training cycle by the same instructors that gave the poor OW training initially.

A C-Card just shows you were trained, the industry already has it's own hurdles to get over to do more advanced dives so I see no reason to change the system. A cert for life has been the standard since certs started and I've heard SCUBA is safer now, than ever before.

If you want to help the dive industry, find the 70% dropouts and asked why they quit and you will have the information you need. Requiring current divers to pay more to remain divers will just make those on the edge quit. There are a lot more things to do in the world than dive; I can't think of any right now, but I've heard.



Bob
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I may be old, but I'm not dead yet.
 
If someone has 5 dives in 10 years and wants to go do <insert challenging dive here>, how is that my business?

flots

It isn't....unless you are the trip leader, most experienced member of the group, the charter operator, the property owner.....you can see where I'm going with this.

It still doesn't mean we need expiration dates on our certs. It just means that if you have a high probability of getting sued, you probably ought to have safeguards to ensure Mr. 5 dives in 10 years doesn't get to dive anywhere he isn't competent to dive(at least if you are somehow involved).

Could you imagine the lawsuit if you took an ow diver with his LA county card out to the Doria just because he dove it a few times in the 80's??? The guy hasn't dove since?
 
i am not sure i want to be captn obvious, but: what's the problem here?

the op & brett seem to be pushing a solution. to what?

i did a training course to get a card so that dive ops would take me diving. end of story. if you want to get me interested, please present a relevant problem. then we can discuss solutions.

</curmudgeon>
 
The biggest issue of drop out in anything is... attracting "the wrong people" in the first place.

One of the problems with scuba diving is that, for the most part, to really know if you're going to like it you need to get certified. Further, there's never been a cogent effort to specifically attract people who are attitudinal likely to be divers. (Everything's demographic.) Accordingly, with essentially a "random recruit" to bring people into the sport, the likelihood that any random person falls in love with diving and stays with it is also a random event. It's hard to influence random events.

Layer in the bucket-list allure, plus the cost, hassle, and logistics - and the overarching fact that diving is not really "for everyone" in the first place - and I think it's surprising that 30% actually STAY with diving.
 
Ah, yes, more bureaucracy as the answer to Life's problems... A few points to consider.

1.) Most divers are adults. Having had the basic OW course to provide the knowledge and make informed decisions, they can choose to repeat training, do scuba tune ups, get additional training, etc... Or not, and deal with the consequences, if any. Sounds to me like adulthood. I prefer it to a nanny state.

2.) Someone else in another thread pointed out how the system would likely imitate the current driver's license renewal scheme; basically a tax that confirms nothing.

3.) The same people who are lambasted for turning out inadequate divers will do a lot of recertification business.

4.) The lifetime nature of a cert. is a good selling point, and since getting more people into the hobby is a big industry concern, making it expire with a bureacratic money making re-certication scheme is not likely to help.

5.) No scheme likely to happen is going to force all recreational divers to be 'good' to the level desired by some on the forum. The standards already in place by mainstream agencies can be used to turn out good divers. I doubt changing them is going to make training fool proof.

6.) If you want a charter boat to let you dive unguided to the limits of your gas, basically however you want to, you need to book a charter that does that regardless of your cert. level. If you go out on a boat running a 2 tank tight schedule due back for an afternoon trip, it doesn't matter if you're AOW, a Master Scuba Diver, a DM, Instructor, Course Director, etc... You're going to do a 50 min. max. dive, be back on the boat at 1 hour max., and if the 'boat rules' for the group are back on boat with 500 PSI and max. depth 100 feet, then letting to break the norm in front of the 'lesser' divers could be disruptive and they're not going to do that.

Recertification is not going to live up to the promise some envision. It will breed a lot of ill-will and become a scuba tax. And it won't eliminate sub-par divers from the diver population to cause mainstream dive boat op.s to let you do whatever you want.

Richard.

---------- Post added January 24th, 2015 at 09:26 PM ----------

i did a training course to get a card so that dive ops would take me diving. end of story. if you want to get me interested, please present a relevant problem. then we can discuss solutions.

I think one of the problems presented, in a number of SB threads, is that a number of divers don't like how some other people dive, and want something 'done about it.' And they keep trying to dream up ways to make that happen. For their own good, of course.

---------- Post added January 24th, 2015 at 09:30 PM ----------

RJP:

One thing about attracting the wrong demographic; you make a little money off the one time course & gear sale/rental. It's like McDonalds; not everybody eats there, but seems like most everybody in the U.S. has tried it. Eat there one time in your life, and they make money. They'll make a lot more money if they can figure out how to get more people coming back, but hey, if that doesn't work out, better a little one time sale money than no money ever.

Unless we're trying to save future non-divers from the cost & hassle of trying scuba, seems to me we're not out to eliminate the 'temporary diver' phenomenon, just convert a higher percentage of them to chronic divers.

Richard.
 
A little history might be helpful.

If you read through enough threads, you will find old timers bragging about the high quality training that was introduced by the first true certification agency, Los Angeles County. Everyone thinks they did a superior job of training new divers, and I have no reason to question that.

In the mid 1960s, though, Los Angeles County recognized a problem--there was a huge dropout rate among the divers they certified. Desperate to find a way to change that, they created a new program to try to entice divers into staying active--the Advanced Open Water Diver certification. NAUI followed suit soon after, and then so did PADI.

If you think the diver retention problem is new, and you are looking for solutions, you might want to keep that historical tidbit in mind.
 
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