To my concern, it's difficult to consider a lot of scuba instructors as professional when the qualifications for the job are so dismally low. I mean, a person can, literally, be teaching scuba with just a handful of classes and little to no practical experience. Would you trust your car to an auto mechanic who, six months earlier had never picked up a wrench or who perhaps hadn't actually driven one? Would you take skiing lessons from someone who was barely themselves out of the snowplow?
How professional is the scuba instructor who got his certification after spending several days at the quarry, doing multiple dives a day to get in the requisite 100 dives? How professional is the instructor who cannot even keep his own fins off the bottom, much less teach someone else how it's done? Or who has so little understanding of what he's supposed to be teaching that he has to rely on a little slate that he got from his agency? How professional is the instructor who anchors his students firmly to the bottom so they don't have to worry about actually DIVING while they're demonstrating mask clear and reg recovery?
I mean ... is it really all about the money? What say you? What do you see in an instructor that causes you to think of him or her as a dive professional?
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
I'm curious, Bob, if you used examples of instructors who most people would agree are probably highly inexperienced and/or incompetent to paint a picture of all instructors.
That in itself says a lot about your point of view but doesn't, in my opinion, reflect on the *majority* of instructors. It does, however, reflect on a minority of instructors that people almost universally have issues with.
The first question in my mind is how fair is it to paint all instructors with *this* brush. If you ask me. Not at all.
It does give us an opening to discuss the bar for "getting in" to this game if someone who achieves that minimum bar can be considered competent but by confusing these two issues (professionalism and the competence level of the lowest skilled among us), you've started out on a foot that's bound to create more confusion than anything else.
Having said that, I'll just speak for myself.
I'm not a professional dive instructor.
Yes I make money at it. I've been involved in training hundreds of people and if I do say so myself, my results are good. Can they improve? Yes. Will they improve? Yes? Every course I teach is a new opportunity for me to do it better than the last time.
Is that professionalism? I don't know and it doesn't matter to me. Maybe my day job affects my thinking about this somewhat, but I think the main measure of professionalism can be made by looking at two things
- the results (the student's skill level)
- the satisfaction of customer quality expectations
If you're teaching people what they need to know (standards, skill-mastery etc.) and you're teaching them to a bar that satisfies them with respect to cost, time, risk and quality and you're doing that with an attitude of integrity (doing what you believe is right), openness (keeping communication clear) and honesty (being realistic), then you're probably showing professionalism.
Where some instructors fail in professionalism, in my opinion, is to make it "about them". There are several examples I can think of, of instructors here on scubaboard who are so busy in their own heads and egos with what *they* want from *their* students that they would appear, to me at least, to have lost perspective on what their students want from them. Some might even go so far as to suggest that satisfying customer quality expectations shouldn't be a goal of instruction, but instead satisfying *instructor* quality expections, should be.
That's not quite the same as, for example, the NAUI approach of allowing instructors to embellish material by, to pick an example, giving students a thorough working knowledge of something relevant like gas-management.
Let's just say there's a fine line in some cases between embelishing material and flying off the rails when personal convictions get in the way of managing this process.
I guess in that way I see being an instructor for *recreational* diving is more like being a coach than being the superstar. The coach stands behind the student and brings out in the student what needs to come out. The superstar says "look at me" "be like me" "accept my ways without question" and only *then* will you be any good. (come to think of it, there's a whole agency built on this attitude). In the first case, if the student wants to become a good warm water diver then the instructor will focus on giving them the skills they need to become a good warm water diver. IN the second case, the instructor won't care what the student wants. The student will have to either drink the kool-aid or fail and then go find an instructor somewhere else who is willing to "coach" them.
So just tying this in with your post, Bob, it gives me some alarm bells when the only thing you really mention about instructors in your introduction are the instructors diving skills. Because you need "coaching" skills for the win.
I know what you're going to say.... "how can someone coach if they don't know how to play" and I think that's a valid concern but it isn't what you *said*. If you want to move the discussion in that (perhaps very productive) direction then this thread might lead somewhere other than into more PADI bashing.
YYMV
R..
