Cost of GUE/DIR training

[LiteHedded]

I was referring to the people that research cures to disease, not ditch diggers. Perhaps you should check your assumptions.

Price should correlate with what you get for it. You cant be guaranteed that the training will benefit you, but you pay up front anyway. Instructors are filling classes, but it isnt always because they are the best. The assumption that a free market is working is based on a fully informed consumer, which you will never be as long as rumors and monopoly control the system.

Everyone picks (to some degree) what profession they chose. A person should not go into SCUBA training with the idea that they deserve to live like a king. I mean to me it looks pretty good to be an instructor. It can be fun, get to spend a lot of time in the water, always have the best gear, and get paid to do it. If you make a name for yourself, you even get shuttled to exotic locales with all expenses paid just to do what you are good at. Sounds more like a permanent vacation. AND if you dont like what you get paid you can always get another job OR leave the profession. It seems like instructors want their cake and to eat it too, but as it has been mentioned life isnt fair.

I will pay for GUE courses because I think training is a far greater investment than other things, but to see some type of monopoly being formed and prices edging higher and higher is just ridiculous. Students need to be reasonable and expect that quality training and classes will be more expensive, but instructors need to be reasonable to and not nickel and dime people to bankruptcy. Otherwise, all those people complaining about how bad typical students are only have to blame themselves for pricing many of the classes out of the range of the typical student just discovering the activity.

this hits the nail on the head.

 

[Scott L]

It seems prices have risen for GUE cave training in Florida while the number of instructors has remained the same. Any thoughts as to why an instructor has not been added?

 

[LiteHedded]

It seems prices have risen for GUE cave training in Florida while the number of instructors has remained the same. Any thoughts as to why an instructor has not been added?

I think someone is interning right now for cave 1

 

[ucfdiver]

I think someone is interning right now for cave 1

That's what I heard too. Don't forget Mark recently went from c1 to c2 instructor.

The problem here is finding people who WANT to teach, and "do the dives" at the same time. The issue I run into is that if I were to teach, even OW, I would miss out on too many fun dives. Look at Brett Hemphill in the CCR world. Laying line all over the place, well respected for CCR (even JJ gave him props in a post), yet doesn't teach. Instead, one of the busiest CCR Cave instructors is a running joke for silting out anything his optima courses cross paths with....but he's highly recommended online, and his last name is one everyone on here would recognize.

 

[LiteHedded]

Brett is a badass. it's not my thing, but he's doing amazing things. super nice guy too

 

[Adobo]

I was referring to the people that research cures to disease, not ditch diggers.

Why does it matter whether we are talking about ditch diggers or scientists? It's the perceived value of their work that drives their compensation.

The assumption that a free market is working is based on a fully informed consumer, which you will never be as long as rumors and monopoly control the system.

I mean to me it looks pretty good to be an instructor. It can be fun, get to spend a lot of time in the water, always have the best gear, and get paid to do it. If you make a name for yourself, you even get shuttled to exotic locales with all expenses paid just to do what you are good at. Sounds more like a permanent vacation. AND if you dont like what you get paid you can always get another job OR leave the profession.

Rumors and monopolies? Permanent vacations? Really? Reeaally??

...but instructors need to be reasonable to and not nickel and dime people to bankruptcy. Otherwise, all those people complaining about how bad typical students are only have to blame themselves for pricing many of the classes out of the range of the typical student just discovering the activity.

If $600 for a class is going to drive someone to bankruptcy, maybe they need to rethink their choice of recreational activities. Bowling for example, you spend maybe $150 on a bowling ball and maybe $100 on bowling shoes. Maybe another $20 for a bowling ball bag and you are good to go. Leaves you about $330 for pizza and beer.

 

[lamont]

Price should correlate with what you get for it.

Sure, but if you dive into that enough "what you get for it" becomes entirely subjective and the Free Market is supposed to be a weighing system to determine what that means in quantifiable (money) terms (although lets not get into trying to define money or we'll be gazing at our navels all night long).

You cant be guaranteed that the training will benefit you, but you pay up front anyway. Instructors are filling classes, but it isnt always because they are the best. The assumption that a free market is working is based on a fully informed consumer, which you will never be as long as rumors and monopoly control the system.

I think most of the Nobels for Economics for the past decade have been on imperfections in the free market system, and a lot of that having to do with information asymmetry. Welcome to how markets and capitalism work in the Real World.

Everyone picks (to some degree) what profession they want to be based on some level of desire and happiness. A person should not go into SCUBA training with the idea that they deserve to live like a king.

The Zero-G guys have a couple nice trucks, but it doesn't look to me like they live like kings. I probably pull in more per year than they do, and I don't exactly work in finance in Manhattan.

I mean to me it looks pretty good to be an instructor. It can be fun, get to spend a lot of time in the water, always have the best gear, and get paid to do it. If you make a name for yourself, you even get shuttled to exotic locales with all expenses paid just to do what you are good at. Sounds more like a permanent vacation. AND if you dont like what you get paid you can always get another job OR leave the profession. It seems like instructors want their cake and to eat it too, but as it has been mentioned life isnt fair.

You're paying for their talent, though. I don't know remotely enough to be able to take a team of divers and stress them in ways that make them learn and produce a course out of it. I do little bits and pieces every time I go out mentoring newer divers, but I couldn't run a course. They've got talent, and its actually a rare one, and it takes a lot of time and investment to develop it, and they're marketing it.

And you couldn't pay me enough to deal with primadonna 5,000+ dive already-certified technical instructors who think they can waltz through a DIRF course.

I will pay for GUE courses because I think training is a far greater investment than other things, but to see some type of monopoly being formed and prices edging higher and higher is just ridiculous. Students need to be reasonable and expect that quality training and classes will be more expensive, but instructors need to be reasonable to and not nickel and dime people to bankruptcy. Otherwise, all those people complaining about how bad typical students are only have to blame themselves for pricing many of the classes out of the range of the typical student just discovering the activity.

GUE isn't out to solve all the problems with the dive industry and fix every diver out there. People keep on making this mistake where they think that GUE owes them or the larger diving community something. It doesn't. GUE is fundamentally a selfish actor out to train divers that seek them out to the standards that they've set, and keep the instructors employed. Up until the point where demand becomes elastic, they can keep raising rates -- all the crappy divers in the whole rest of the world doesn't enter into the equation. That is not GUEs problem to solve. Neither is it GUEs problem to train any one particular diver out there, including anyone reading this thread -- GUE has a product and either you buy it, or you don't.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

A person should not go into SCUBA training with the idea that they deserve to live like a king. I mean to me it looks pretty good to be an instructor. It can be fun, get to spend a lot of time in the water, always have the best gear, and get paid to do it. If you make a name for yourself, you even get shuttled to exotic locales with all expenses paid just to do what you are good at. Sounds more like a permanent vacation.

That's a common misconception people have about scuba instructors ... and it's a crock.

Teaching a class isn't a vacation. It's work. Teaching a quality class is hard work. Spending time in the water with students is nothing at all like spending time in the water with your dive buddies. It's a lot of responsibility and a lot of stress. You have to always be on your guard, because students can do unpredictable, incredibly stupid things and if they hurt themselves, it's your fault. You have to be professional, even when you'd like to smack someone upside the head for being an idiot ... or walk away because they're being an *******. You have to smile and find constructive ways of trying to explain the same thing over and over, when you'd really like to just be telling someone that they'd be better off spending their recreational time in a bowling alley.

When I was taking my instructor training, my course director once told me that you have to have the mindset that you are in the water with a bunch of people who are actively trying to kill you ... in practice it's not quite that bad, but after a few years of teaching I do understand what he was getting at. There's a reason why most instructors burn out after a very few years of teaching ... and it isn't because it's like a permanent vacation.

And all that quality gear you mentioned? Guess what ... you have to buy it. I've got about $30K worth of gear in my garage ... half of which I wouldn't have if I weren't teaching. Sure, you get some of it at discount prices ... but that varies wildly depending on your teaching situation.

After teaching for five years, I had to take a year away from it ... because instructing was making scuba something less than fun, and I didn't want it to get to that point. I love teaching ... I discovered after a few months away from it that I really missed it ... but anyone who thinks it's an easy job really has no idea what they're talking about. And nobody that I know goes into it thinking they're going to be making a lot of money at it.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[lamont]

It seems prices have risen for GUE cave training in Florida while the number of instructors has remained the same. Any thoughts as to why an instructor has not been added?

Because GUE trains instructors and only certifies them when they're interested, motivated and ready. Not when they just need another warm body to teach a course.

Shortages of instructors are kind of a good thing. It means that quality control isn't being sacrificed just to increase the throughput of the diver mill.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

The problem here is finding people who WANT to teach, and "do the dives" at the same time. The issue I run into is that if I were to teach, even OW, I would miss out on too many fun dives.

That's what I ran into ... discovered I was missing out on a LOT of excellent opportunities with my regular dive buddies because I had a class that week. Part of the reason I took a year away from teaching was so that I could go do some of those dives ... and finally make it down to Florida and get my cave training.

Instead, one of the busiest CCR Cave instructors is a running joke for silting out anything his optima courses cross paths with....but he's highly recommended online, and his last name is one everyone on here would recognize.

For once I know EXACTLY who you're talking about ... surprised the crap outta me when I saw how his class was trashing the caves. Most of those guys wouldn't have passed my AOW class with that lack of buoyancy control ... and for sure they didn't belong in a cave diving like that ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)