While there may be some truth to this, it certainly is far from the full story. One of the reasons instructors matter, irrespective of agency standards, is simply how well they can teach and whether their style meshes with that of the student. You can have an instructor that holds a high, stringent bar, but if they are not patient or unable to explain concepts well, the student will not get much out of it. As a college professor who has trained and worked at various institutions throughout the country, the idea of looking for a good professor(s), instead of an institution is not silly at all. In fact, when it comes to graduate training, this is exactly the advice students should follow. If a student goes to Harvard, but does not mesh with their graduate advisor, they will come out ill-prepared, if they finish at all. At the end of the day it's the same for scuba training. I always tell prospective dive students to ask around for feedback on instructors in their area, go and talk with the instructor and decide if they are someone you want to work with.
Is there a "hardest cert/most stringent certifier?"
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While there may be some truth to this, it certainly is far from the full story. One of the reasons instructors matter, irrespective of agency standards, is simply how well they can teach and whether their style meshes with that of the student. You can have an instructor that holds a high, stringent bar, but if they are not patient or unable to explain concepts well, the student will not get much out of it. As a college professor who has trained and worked at various institutions throughout the country, the idea of looking for a good professor(s), instead of an institution is not silly at all. In fact, when it comes to graduate training, this is exactly the advice students should follow. If a student goes to Harvard, but does not mesh with their graduate advisor, they will come out ill-prepared, if they finish at all. At the end of the day it's the same for scuba training. I always tell prospective dive students to ask around for feedback on instructors in their area, go and talk with the instructor and decide if they are someone you want to work with.
Well put. When I began some technical training this year, my expectations were that I would learn a few new things that would make my diving a bit safer and more enjoyable. After all, I already had lots of (single tank) decompression dives under my belt. Let's just say I was rather humbled by how much I needed to learn, especially in terms of developing skills. I absolutely view my courses as a "mentorship," and I don't see how it could work safely otherwise.
bamafan
Contributor
GUE is the only agency that I know of that requires their instructors to do a certain number of real dives at a certain level to maintain their instructor status. I am sure someone can provide the specifics. In tech diving you would really be suprised at the number of instructors who do few dives outside of teaching or guiding. I have been told by more than one instructor that the reason they won't teach for GUE is the dive requirement. That being said I don't have any GUE training but if I was to do it over again I think it is the best overall program out there.
This is true. I think CMAS has a similar standard but GUE do require their instructors to know what they're talking about.....
That said, I don't know if I audited a typical GUE course but the one saw being run at close proximity was pretty bad.
For example, one of the students, a young woman, put her wing on the BP backwards (inflator to the back). It was the first time she had ever seen a wing. I saw it happening but didn't intervene because I was afraid that the instructor would flip out if I got involved. He same along and saw (that was good) that the kit was set up wrong and literally said (that was bad) .... "YOU MUST FOCUS!!!!!!!".
He didn't tell her what she did wrong. He didn't tell her how to fix it. He didn't tell her how to avoid it in the future. All three of those things are things that ingraned from day 1 in to the DNA of most recreational instructors.
She looked at me (a stranger) with big eyes because she didn't understand what she had done wrong. At this point I stepped in and told her what she had done, what she should have done, how to see if she had done it correctly and how to check it..... in other words, what her instructor should have done.
The instructor then pounced on me and started a tirade about how I was a lousy diver (he didn't know me and didn't know that I was a highly experienced technical diver) and that she shouldn't listen. He then repeated what I had already told her.
The following 4 or 5 days the course went on and on like that with the instructor making things unnecessarily difficult and not telling his students how to fix it. In the evenings we went to the local watering hole together with his students and they asked ME how to fix thier problems so they could get through the course.
This is what I meant when I said that GUE instructors will make things difficult without making them better. It may have only been this one instructor, but I've heard from others as well that the focus on making things difficult without making them better is common in GUE courses.
Things that are hard are not always better. In fact, in my opinion, if you, as an instructor, make things EASY then you are probaly delivering better results.
R..
As others have said, GUE is different from other agencies. If you are thinking along those lines, take a goo, long look at all the policies, all the requirements, all the costs, etc. There is a lot more to that commitment than there is with other agencies.
As for other agencies, it very much depends upon the instructor. If you want really good training, I suggest the following steps.
1. Decide how far you really want to go with this. Scuba training is a lot like hiking in some mountainous areas--you think you are reaching the peak, then when you get there you see that there is another peak beyond the one you just climbed. It seems like you never reach the end. Do you want to be a better tropical reef diver? That's an early peak--there are many more to come.
2. Talk to instructors who are truly able to take you as far as you want to go. In my experience, most--and I mean 90% of the ones I have known--are very good tropical reef divers, and many can do an excellent job preparing you for that. On the other hand, they don't know a blessed thing about anything beyond that and cannot even describe it to you, let alone teach you about it. If you think you might want to get into decompression diving, cave diving, advanced wreck diving, etc., you will need to find an instructor who at least knows enough about that stuff to give you good advice.
3. Get that good advice. A good and knowledgeable instructor will listen to you to hear what you are hoping to do and help you plan your path. Your route to excellence can be perfectly designed to meet your specific needs. If you talk with a few instructors, you will get a feel for the one(s) you want to work with.
4. Be prepared to change your plans as your interests evolve. That seems simple, but it can be more complicated than it seems. It goes back to your first choice of agencies--some lock you into a sequence from which there is nearly no escape. In my own training, I realized I was stuck in such a track, and I had to make a major cross over to a different agency to find the flexibility I needed to meet my personal goals. If I had stayed locked into that agency with its approach, I would not be nearly the diver I am today.
As for other agencies, it very much depends upon the instructor. If you want really good training, I suggest the following steps.
1. Decide how far you really want to go with this. Scuba training is a lot like hiking in some mountainous areas--you think you are reaching the peak, then when you get there you see that there is another peak beyond the one you just climbed. It seems like you never reach the end. Do you want to be a better tropical reef diver? That's an early peak--there are many more to come.
2. Talk to instructors who are truly able to take you as far as you want to go. In my experience, most--and I mean 90% of the ones I have known--are very good tropical reef divers, and many can do an excellent job preparing you for that. On the other hand, they don't know a blessed thing about anything beyond that and cannot even describe it to you, let alone teach you about it. If you think you might want to get into decompression diving, cave diving, advanced wreck diving, etc., you will need to find an instructor who at least knows enough about that stuff to give you good advice.
3. Get that good advice. A good and knowledgeable instructor will listen to you to hear what you are hoping to do and help you plan your path. Your route to excellence can be perfectly designed to meet your specific needs. If you talk with a few instructors, you will get a feel for the one(s) you want to work with.
4. Be prepared to change your plans as your interests evolve. That seems simple, but it can be more complicated than it seems. It goes back to your first choice of agencies--some lock you into a sequence from which there is nearly no escape. In my own training, I realized I was stuck in such a track, and I had to make a major cross over to a different agency to find the flexibility I needed to meet my personal goals. If I had stayed locked into that agency with its approach, I would not be nearly the diver I am today.
I love John's posts. If there is one person in Scubaboard that everyone should follow, it's him.
I'd like to just emphasize one point he makes. Instructors are not all able to do everything. I can only relate this to my own case but if you're a newbie wanting to learn to dive or a diver wanting to learn wreck diving, drysuit diving and a number of other diving related specialties.... then I'm the guy you want. My hobbies outside of my work ar history, archaeology and diving.
Want to learn underwater photography? Fish ID? etc... LOL... don't ask me.
Deep diving? Nitrox? No. Almost all of my own dives are deep and/or nitrox but I'm not willing to teach that to newbies. The point being that even if someone is thoroughly competent in something, they may not be the instructor you're looking for.
I think this is what happens a lot. People find an instructor who is an expert in something and fail to step back and ask if they are also an expert at TEACHING that thing. There is a difference.
R..
I'd like to just emphasize one point he makes. Instructors are not all able to do everything. I can only relate this to my own case but if you're a newbie wanting to learn to dive or a diver wanting to learn wreck diving, drysuit diving and a number of other diving related specialties.... then I'm the guy you want. My hobbies outside of my work ar history, archaeology and diving.
Want to learn underwater photography? Fish ID? etc... LOL... don't ask me.
Deep diving? Nitrox? No. Almost all of my own dives are deep and/or nitrox but I'm not willing to teach that to newbies. The point being that even if someone is thoroughly competent in something, they may not be the instructor you're looking for.
I think this is what happens a lot. People find an instructor who is an expert in something and fail to step back and ask if they are also an expert at TEACHING that thing. There is a difference.
R..
No matter what anyone says, the instructor does matter, not only in scuba diving but in everything else, including courses at places such as MIT and Harvard. In my own experience, I have had good instructors and learned a great deal and I have had poor instructors. With them, you can take what's offered and nothing more or learn the subject on your own. Consider that the alphabet soup of training agencies all have the same standards for the open water course. Every agency in the US teaches to the RSTC standard and it must work fairly well because new divers aren't killing themselves on the first dives after certification. Even in that context, I believe that a good instructor makes all the difference. A good instructor is committed to teaching you what is needed, whether or not its in the curriculum. A good instructor will work with the student until they "get it", whatever "it" happens to be. For advanced courses, a good instructor will focus the training on what the student wants and needs to learn.
I really like what Diver0001 said, not every instructor can teach or is good at teaching everything. That's true for me as well. I enjoy teaching new divers and I try to give them more than the standards dictate, but I don't make it "harder", just more effective, in my opinion.
The best advice I could give about finding an instructor is to find one who is passionate about teaching the particular thing you want to learn. Any instructor worth a damn will communicate that passion to you.
I really like what Diver0001 said, not every instructor can teach or is good at teaching everything. That's true for me as well. I enjoy teaching new divers and I try to give them more than the standards dictate, but I don't make it "harder", just more effective, in my opinion.
The best advice I could give about finding an instructor is to find one who is passionate about teaching the particular thing you want to learn. Any instructor worth a damn will communicate that passion to you.
I'm piling on the GUE bandwagon. Instructors are held to a high standard. Although GUE Fundamentals is a recreational-level class, all GUE instructors are certified as technical divers. To maintain their instructor status, they are required to requalify every four years, and ALL GUE divers are required to do 25 non-training dives over a 3-year span at their highest certification level. So if I'm not mistaken, for example, if an instructor is certified to Cave 2 level with a rebreather, the instructor must do 25 dives that qualify as Cave 2 with rebreather and have nothing to with training students. I have heard there is a new instructor fitness (BMI) requirement, too, though I haven't seen it appear in the published standards.
As others have said, the quality of instruction through any agency comes down to the instructor. Some instructors are awesome and go above and beyond what's required, while others just teach the minimum their agency requires. It's not that instruction from GUE is necessarily better than instruction from someone affiliated with another agency. Rather, it's that GUE instructor quality is more uniform.
However, as has also been pointed out, GUE teaches a "system" of gear configuration and procedures that differs from what most others teach. (UTD teaches a similar system, but I am not familiar with UTD.) GUE really wants you to buy into the idea of a complete system, in which all the parts work together to form the whole, and certain core parts are not to be messed with. Some people find the system too rigid. (Of course, nobody forces a diver to stick rigidly to the system after he completes the Fundamentals class; a diver is free to adopt or discard any or all of what was taught.) For me, the idea of a complete system, in which they spoon-fed me every detail, was actually appealing. Others object to this as a sort of herd mentality and prefer to "do their own thing" based on what they feel works better for them and their diving style and goals.
KevinNM
Contributor
I've only worked with 5 GUE instructors and they all are just amazing divers. As far as I know they all had over 1000 dives before becoming an instructor for GUE.
GUE is very small. Their instructors pretty much know all the other local (is in all of North America or all of Europe as local) instructors. GUE instructors who get a student who a previous instructor passed but is not really qualified with the skills from that class seem to commonly call the previous instructor and express their displeasure, and nobody really likes that conversation. So they don't give tech passes to marginal students.
I was told that getting a tech pass means the instructor is confident that if tomorrow you showed up for a cave 1 or a tech 1 class you would be fully prepared work on the new material in the class and the tech instructor isn't going to have to worry about your trim or buoyancy going to hell when he tasks loads you with the new stuff he's going to teach.
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LA COUNTY
Established in 1954 as a regional diving training organization for SoCal.
From LA County sprung NAUI in 1960 and PADI in 1969...and was copied but never equaled .by the world's training organizations. Many, no most of the organizations can trace their genealogy to LA County
Course consists of the following:
November Pre test
swimming & watermanship
diving knowledge
Personal review and suggestions
January course begins
3 months of very intensive training
Saturday & Sundays
Tuesdays Dive team member meeting
Wednesday Academic or watermanship
evaluations and or practice
Concurrently
Surveys
beach diving area
diving boat
Prepare research dissertation
presented
defended
published (generally 20 plus pages)
Graduation in March
Many apply
only the best are accepted
a select few graduate
They are true divers ...not just people who dive
They are true dive instructors ...not just instructors
SDM
LA Co UW instructor #11 UICC
NAUI instructor #27
PADI 241 ( or 2241 ?)
( and a heck of a lot more instructor organizations )
Pro 5000
California SCUBA Service Award 2013
LA county awards and honors;
Outstanding contributions to Underwater Instruction --1964
( I developed a number of the procedures now in use by many of you today as well as the instructor & diver classification system which was rejected by LA Co and NAUI but much later accepted by PADI )
Outstanding Los Angeles Underwater instructor of the year 1969
(same year PADI came to life)
Dive master (an LA Co term) 1970 to 1973
a UICC team leader
trains UICC candidates
( 3 months of very involvement)
(For more information about my background suggest google my name plus SCUBA or Diver etc)
sdm
Established in 1954 as a regional diving training organization for SoCal.
From LA County sprung NAUI in 1960 and PADI in 1969...and was copied but never equaled .by the world's training organizations. Many, no most of the organizations can trace their genealogy to LA County
Course consists of the following:
November Pre test
swimming & watermanship
diving knowledge
Personal review and suggestions
January course begins
3 months of very intensive training
Saturday & Sundays
Tuesdays Dive team member meeting
Wednesday Academic or watermanship
evaluations and or practice
Concurrently
Surveys
beach diving area
diving boat
Prepare research dissertation
presented
defended
published (generally 20 plus pages)
Graduation in March
Many apply
only the best are accepted
a select few graduate
They are true divers ...not just people who dive
They are true dive instructors ...not just instructors
SDM
LA Co UW instructor #11 UICC
NAUI instructor #27
PADI 241 ( or 2241 ?)
( and a heck of a lot more instructor organizations )
Pro 5000
California SCUBA Service Award 2013
LA county awards and honors;
Outstanding contributions to Underwater Instruction --1964
( I developed a number of the procedures now in use by many of you today as well as the instructor & diver classification system which was rejected by LA Co and NAUI but much later accepted by PADI )
Outstanding Los Angeles Underwater instructor of the year 1969
(same year PADI came to life)
Dive master (an LA Co term) 1970 to 1973
a UICC team leader
trains UICC candidates
( 3 months of very involvement)
(For more information about my background suggest google my name plus SCUBA or Diver etc)
sdm
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