go tec or stay rec

[pholife]

Hey all!
need a bit of advice from ya'll out there, I'm stuck in a predicament!

ok... so I have savings enough and have been offered 2 pretty good opportunities, and I can not make my mind up.

Alright, I've been out of the water about 4 months and have a good job offer going back to recreational teaching with contract and all the good stuff you struggle with being a scuba instructor.

On the other hand I've got some savings (enough) for a great internship to move up the ranks to a DSAT tec instructor with a few tec specs also and move to trimix diver.

I dream of tec diving, I have completed all the KR's for tec deep and would love not only be diving this but moving towards instructing too. The location of the training is one of the best places in the world for tec diving and the job offer is a city dive center in a great city with tons of travel options and paying very well with a 1 year contract.

I know the costs of tec and also as a previous dive shop manager, the demands for tec instructors is low and the volume of courses is low too..

should I stay rec or go tec.


any help would be greatly appriciated!!!!

 

[rongoodman]

I think you should get some experience with technical diving before you consider teaching it.

 

[Dsix36]

If there is a possibility of making money while doing the type diving that you enjoy, that sort of answers the question right there.

 

[tomfcrist]

It depends on your confidence level with tec diving. I personally had been "tec" diving for many years prior to becoming certified, thus my certification course was a mere review.....well that's not entirely true.....I did learn some new tricks. But the point is that I would have been plenty capable of teaching tec immediately after being certified.
Your agency prerequisites may be your hold up. I know some agencies require X amount of dives in certain configurations prior to being certified to teach it.

 

[pholife]

It depends on your confidence level with tec diving. I personally had been "tec" diving for many years prior to becoming certified, thus my certification course was a mere review.....well that's not entirely true.....I did learn some new tricks. But the point is that I would have been plenty capable of teaching tec immediately after being certified.
Your agency prerequisites may be your hold up. I know some agencies require X amount of dives in certain configurations prior to being certified to teach it.

yup... I am msdt.... well over 300 certs. got all the right certs for moving to tec deep instructor. ie. # of EanX certs issued, # of Deep Certs issued. I'm familiar with sidemount configurations and have dozens of cave dives logged (h valve set up) but as for the formal training.... nope no tec training besides rec sidemount...

The internship is over 4 months and under a course director, thus I will be conducting courses alongside him to gain the "tec certs needed" for Instructor status...

Any more thoughts?

 

[elan]

I would probably repeat the previous posters but I cannot see myself being a technical instructor without quite some experience in technical diving. I have seen a few guys like that and they looked pretty "pale". You can feel right away that the person is not experienced. Why not keep teaching and getting all your certs gain experience and then start teaching the tec?

 

[BluewaterSail]

As a prospective student, I would not choose a tech instructor who hadn't been diving tech for years, at a level above the course I would be taking with him.

 

[GrimSleeper]

Having just bitten the bullet and become a tec instructor after a lot of agonising over whether I'm a good enough tec diver to teach it, I'd echo and maybe strengthen what others have said. Do the diver-level courses, then do the diving and keep doing the diving until every step of it - deco planning, gas planning, logistics, deco ascents, emergency drills, actual emergencies, everything - are all 'just another dive'. You really shouldn't be learning anything while doing an instructor course at this level.

Once the protocols for gas-switching, say, are so ingrained that you instinctively and unconsciously notice that a team-mate is about to make a mistake, once you've handled some real problems, once deco ascents become so second-nature that you can write a fairly lengthy note to a team-mate in your wet-notes while sticking exactly to a schedule of 1-minute stops, then it's time to start thinking about teaching it.

There's no substitute for far too much time spent carting far too many tanks about far too far down.

 

[waterpirate]

1 more vote for never take a course from someone who is not doing alot of diving several levels beyond the course you are taking. Get yourself tec trained, and rack up 500 or more dives before seeking tec instructor status.
Eric

 

[Griffo]

I'm actually shocked that you can get a Tec instructor rating without hundreds of Tec dives first... I know other agencies not only have pre-entry requirements around # of dives to the instruction level, but they even require their instructors to do a certain number of non-training tec dives each year to keep their status.