Different instructor’s name on card

[Diver0001]

From the paperwork it seems like they could easily notice that many instructors/DMs in a shop had gotten deep/rescue/etc several times over. Someone getting one or two twice, ok; most getting it twice or more, very suspicious.

I presume the shop explained it as a "policy" to ensure that new instructors got some experience teaching those specialties without putting anyone at undo risk. Such a policy is not forbidden.

You can always explain it, right?

R..

 

[MichaelMc]

I presume the shop explained it as a "policy" to ensure that new instructors got some experience teaching those specialties without putting anyone at undo risk. Such a policy is not forbidden.

You can always explain it, right?

R..

Plausible, and a reasonable policy. But odd enough to say 'there has been abuse. As QA, please send us your boat and dive logs with manifests and divers for all your classes in the past year.' Presumably it would fall apart at that point. With several people both taking and giving a dive at the same time. Or boats being over loaded. Deep shore dives are an issue with catching proof on paper.

And it seems as if that policy is part of instruction, so not actually teaching new divers that get issued cards. That seems like counting 'teaching' your instructor trainers. So why issue the card??

 

[Diver0001]

I don't think PADI has CSI working for them. Their QA triggers mostly on verifiable eye witness accounts of standards violations and on accident reports. Without a whistle blower it would be hard for them to verify with 100% certainty that what they THINK may be happening at a given shop is ACTUALLY happening. PADI, much to their credit, does not take QA action based on rumour or speculation. They only act on hard evidence.

Clearly the shop (or instructors) involved were taking a risk but as long as they don't have someone who breaks formation and admits everything to QA (and probably ends his/her own career as an instructor by doing so) then they can keep up the charade. It may even go on for years without anyone noticing since certification processing is an automated process and it's very unlikely that they are running the kind of analytics on their database that would make this kind of thing ping.

Hell... the way it looks to me (as someone whose job it is to work with industrial scale ICT) it looks to me like PADI has trouble finding a competent partner to build a website, let alone deal with their big-data issues.

R..

 

[MichaelMc]

I don't think PADI has CSI working for them

Likely, though the big data analytics are fairly simple. A policy of not counting duplicate certs to other shop staff toward advancement would seem simple enough. No proof of nefarious intent needed, they just don't count.

Edit: The analytics is: if (student work at shop) and (student has cert): then issue new cert card, but do not count for advancement. Getting that data is basic SQL from 20+ years ago, not even big data analytics. I wrote SQL 20+ years ago and now do security of machine learning... So I kind of know.

 

[mmerriman]

I have seen cases where instructors dual teach a class/dives and then one of them gets listed as the instructor, not always the instructor that did the last dive.

which is against standards....
"Within seven days of a student finishing all course requirements, the certifying instructor who completed the final open water training dive or the last performance
requirement of courses without dives...."

 

[mmerriman]

In the PADI system, the name of the instructor who did your LAST checkout dive is the one that should be on the card. If it is another name then it is a standards violation.

The reason this happens is that sometimes highly experienced instructors who don't "need" any more "certifications" in order to climb the agency ladder will "give" those certifications to a colleague who is just starting. This way, a new instructor can become MSDT certified in a very short time, for example, which will open doors for them.

At a shop where I used to work this was standard operating procedure but we were always careful to make sure that the instructors whose name was on the card actually did the last dive.

I've heard of (and seen some) examples of this not being the case at all. A shop I know certified a new instructor all the way IDCS without her ever (or very often) getting wet if I'm not mistaken. She was *present* at the dives, but doing "surface supervision". This is a way that standards can be abused by making use of wiggle room that the agency didn't intend.

An old acquaintance of mine used to brag about this. He called it "cross certifying". In the PADI system it is not forbidden for someone to be certified more than once for a given course. For example, I have been certified for rescue diver twice because I took it in 1985 and then again in 1998 as a way to refresh my skills because I wanted to learn to be a DM.

So in the case of this shop I'm talking about, when they had new instructors they would have that instructor do what he called "cross certify" all the other instructors at the shop for specialties they could already teach. Some of them would have been certified multiple times for deep diving, for example, by different instructors, but it was all done on paper. Since they had the certification already the newbie instructors didn't have to worry about certifying someone who was unqualified and, of course, when asked, their colleagues would cover by saying, "of course he taught me". Nothing stops a shop from re-teaching instructors on the same course time after time and they lied about it by claiming that it was actually happening when in fact, they were just submitting certifications without doing any diving.

In this way someone could be brought from OWSI to MSDT in an afternoon of filling in forms. He also described it as a bit of a quid pro quo interaction that required participation in this way of working as well as benefiting from it. In other words, they were expected to return the favor to the next guy.

Why he would brag about that is completely beyond me but I guess he felt it was a completely legitimate way of moving up the PADI ladder, which, by the way PADI would refute in the strongest language, I'm sure. How do they root it out, however, when it's all documented exactly the same way as the other million certifications they issue per year and everyone lies when the call and ask about it.....

But yeah, stuff like this happens. ALL the time, and it's not new. In 1985 the name of the instructor on my Rescue card was someone I had never even met before.

R..

I've heard of places certifying scuba diver then OW diver, but never having multiple instructors certify for the same thing - that seems WRONG

 

[Carl_F]

And this statement is completely false. SSI also has a Master Instructor level as well.

D'oh!!That's what I thought but when I did a quick skim of the PDF bookmarks of the Standards file, I missed it! It's there. I've fixed my post but it will live on in infamy in the quoted replies.

 

[Diver0001]

Likely, though the big data analytics are fairly simple. A policy of not counting duplicate certs to other shop staff toward advancement would seem simple enough. No proof of nefarious intent needed, they just don't count.

Edit: The analytics is: if (student work at shop) and (student has cert): then issue new cert card, but do not count for advancement. Getting that data is basic SQL from 20+ years ago, not even big data analytics. I wrote SQL 20+ years ago and now do security of machine learning... So I kind of know.

This is true. I have an ICT background myself, which is why I'm pretty sure that they hired the cheapest possible people who responded to their tender to build their ICT without thinking for a single moment about the possible quality implications.

In project management you have a triad of issues to manage in broad terms. Quality, Time and Money. As a project manager you can pull REALLY hard on two of those corners but you have to let the other corner "float".

Normally in projects I work in government and I need to pull really hard on Quality and Time but I don't have to worry too much about money (sometimes Quality and Money, but that's more rare... but Quality always factors).

As any user of the PADI website will quickly deduce, they pulled really hard on Time and Money and let the Quality corner float. From what I've seen of the quality of their ICT as a user of it, I have my doubts about their ICT capabilities and I wouldn't think that processing big-data would be high on their list of priorities given all of the obvious shortcomings that still need dealt with.

Of course, I don't work for PADI, I don't consult for them and I have ZERO knowledge of how this is managed. All I can do is judge what I THINK must be happening in their ICT domain based on what I see as a user, which is highly discouraging, to say the very least.

R..

 

[MichaelMc]

In project management you have a triad of issues to manage in broad terms. Quality, Time and Money. As a project manager you can pull REALLY hard on two of those corners but you have to let the other corner "float".

Yes. Features, Quality, and Cost. Pick two. Oh..., and not picking Quality will wind up being expensive. But go ahead, tell me which two we are doing.