Survey Results: Student Preparedness & Satisfaction Following Pool/Confined Water

[stuartv]

Saw some interesting data recently suggesting that the divers with the best retention rates are those who did academic/pool at home... and referral checkout dives in a warm-water location. Divers who do their ENTIRE training in warm-water have significantly higher dropout rates.

Isn't this the same as saying "divers who had no significant up-front commitment to getting certified drop out more than people who made a significant up-front commitment to get certified?"

Warm water training is something that someone can show up to their resort, ask the concierge/activities coordinator for something to do, pay some of their "resort points" to do, and get certified in 2 or 3 days. No real commitment, beyond the 2 or 3 days, and some points - or even some money, maybe.

OTOH, someone who does the academic and pool at home, then does referral dives has to make a MUCH bigger commitment. It costs more to do it that way - at least, in every single scenario I looked into. And the time commitment is also much bigger. Not that they necessarily are committing more actual time to academic/pool/OW dives. It's that they are committing to (generally) several days at home, plus at least two days at their warm water destination, PLUS all the days in between. Instead of 2 or 3 days from start to finish, they are committing to probably at least 2 weeks and could be 2 months or longer, from start to finish. Even with the exact same amount of time actually put in, the emotional commitment to something that takes 3 days from start to finish is nothing like the emotional commitment when it will take 2 months from start to finish.

It's the difference between trying something on a lark, during a period of time you already have set aside for "fun stuff" and doing something that requires forethought and purposeful allocation of time in advance.

I can't see why anyone would be remotely surprised at the data you (RJP) reported seeing.

 

[RJP]

I can't see why anyone would be remotely surprised at the data you (RJP) reported seeing.

Not even the shops/instructors offering the types of courses that seem to correlate with poorly prepared, less satisfied students?

:shocked2:

 

[stuartv]

Not even the shops/instructors offering the types of courses that seem to correlate with poorly prepared, less satisfied students?

:shocked2:

Okay. Fair enough. Let me rephrase. I can't see why one of average or better intelligence would be surprised. However, I'm not sure how the intelligence thing correlates to shop owners, whether they have students that feel poorly prepared and/or dissatisfied or not. Those guys could be very sharp and have a short-term strategy at work.

 

[RJP]

Those guys could be very sharp and have a short-term strategy at work.

Yeah.. "It will cost us less to go bankrupt short-term rather than going bankrupt slowly over the long-term."

At BTS I was having a discussion with the owner of a large northeast dive shop. At the same time he was bemoaning poor diver retention rates he bragged that his current "enlightened" market strategy was to focus on pushing as many referral divers through academics and pool work at home - in three days total time - and then send them off to do their checkout dives on vacation. He was also very anti-eLearning, preferring to spend hours in the shop's classroom on academics.

Gee... I wonder why his students tend to not come back.

 

[widget]

To be clear... students who do their ENTIRE training in warm water have a significantly higher drop-out rate than those that do pool work locally and referral dives in a warm location.

If what you say is true - and it may well be - what then is the explanation for "tropically trained" divers dropping out at higher rate?

Well, I dont have stats, its just my experience from years of training student divers.

I think maybe we also need to separate so called "tropically trained divers" from divers trained in a "warm water environment". My impression is divers who do a course on say a 7 day vacation to a warm climate somewhere are often just doing it to dive there and then, to them possibly its just another interest for a vacation, like learning to water ski or something, its nice while you are there and it gives a sense of accomplishment but when you go home its not something you feel the urge to continue.

However, divers who sign on for a course in their home town as it were, are more committed and if they are trained comprehensively in a comfortable warm water environment will learn a lot better and far more enjoyably than a similar diver shivering and shaking in a cold pool of 45 F. Cold divers find it hard to master even basic skills and it becomes a chore for them, whereas the comfortable divers will in my opinion be far more likely to find the course interesting and stimulating and would participate in the sport longer.

I know there is a fairly big referral system for training in the USA and possibly its now accepted as a norm by many divers domestically, but internationally its not that big.
Locally, here, its virtually a non starter and from my time training in Europe its pretty much non existent there too, here the instructor who starts your training finishes your training and signs you off, this creates a bond of trust and few students here (or in my experience in many European countries) would accept been referred away to do their OW dives, they just would not accept it, and, personally, I dont think its a good system at all either, its my experience a student gets to trust their training instructor, and then to be fobbed off to someone else for their OW dives who they dont / may not really know or feel comfortable with, at a point where, in essence, they would like to be in a known environment (ie) with their training instructor, isnt good for diver retention either.

 

[RJP]

Widget... I think there are issues of geographic location - and scale - in the US that don't always exist elsewhere. Consider that folks like boulderjohn teach in an area that is nowhere near anyplace with warm water. If divers want to start their training at home - and a great many do - they will certainly NOT do their checkout dives with that same instructor. Even here in NJ, shop logistics are such that even if you do your checkout dives locally (a 4-5mo of the year proposition anyway) there's a better than even chance you'll have a different instructor than you did in the pool.

---------- Post added April 8th, 2015 at 04:36 PM ----------

, I dont think its a good system at all either, its my experience a student gets to trust their training instructor, and then to be fobbed off to someone else for their OW dives who they dont / may not really know or feel comfortable with, at a point where, in essence, they would like to be in a known environment (ie) with their training instructor, isnt good for diver retention either.

However, the data suggests that it's exactly those people - local pool, warm-water referral - who have the HIGHEST retention rates among all divers.

n=1, but that's how I did it.

 

[stuartv]

Yeah.. "It will cost us less to go bankrupt short-term rather than going bankrupt slowly over the long-term."

There are a variety of reasons I can think of, just off the top of my head, why a business might choose a short-term strategy that results in a recent history on the books of showing that they've trained a lot of divers. Reasons other than "I want to go broke."

 

[RJP]

There are a variety of reasons I can think of, just off the top of my head, why a business might choose a short-term strategy that results in a recent history on the books of showing that they've trained a lot of divers. Reasons other than "I want to go broke."

Such as... cooking the books to sell the business? In my previous line of work that sort of thing was known a "channel stuffing" which was either dumb, illegal, or both depending on whether it was a plaintiff's attorney, a defendant's attorney, or the SEC conducting the deposition.

 

[descent]

... In my previous line of work that sort of thing was known a "channel stuffing" ...

Hah! Yes. Are we addled by an excess of sunshine on the left coast? West Coast goods in use are sometimes booked as inventory "out on demo" until it is convenient to make another invoice for the "sale" of the same systems. A lot of these invoices get made just before Christmas, in late March, just after school lets out, etc.

In hallway meetings out here, the idea of storing finished goods in whichever warehouse at whatever various levels of distribution is not called channel stuffing.

It's called "hitting your numbers this quarter".

 

[RJP]

Hah! Yes. Are we addled by an excess of sunshine on the left coast?

Those pesky shareholders always felt they had the right to know what was actually going on with the business they were paying us to run for them. Several US attorneys and circuit courts seemed to agree. Nosy b@stards!