How Much Consideration Goes Into Your Choice of PADI/NAUI/SSI etc. for New Divers?

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Sounds to me (especially with only 1 post to your name) that you are more unhappy with a dive shop than the company doing the certification and are now bashing an entire organization over a bad experience with a specific place/people. Also, as one experienced diver told me, the adventure dives are more for getting you time in the water than for milking money out of people. If you happen to sign up for something extra, more power to the organization to have gotten you to do that.


Thanks for responding, but bashing PADI due to a bad dive shop is not what I'm doing. The dive shop definitely didn't help the matter, but our primary unhappiness was due to PADI's inflexibility and inability to provide us with any good reason why they wouldn't credit us with a deep dive class taken with another organization. My opinion of their adventure dives is my own and thank you very much, but I'm keeping it.

I expect that by referring to my, "only 1 post", that you are either trying to discourage myself and other new members to scubaboard.com from posting our opinions on discussions, or are trying to invalidate my response because it's ridiculous to think that a person with only one response could ever form a valuable response to another's question. My understanding was that this is supposed to be a friendly discussion zone where, "divers of any skill level may ask questions about basic scuba topics without fear of being accosted".
 
I never did much research into what organization i wanted to get certified by. I saw that the university i am in had a scuba diving class and i took it to discover scuba and to get certified if i could. The instructor was with PADI and that is who i certified with. I did not know of any other organization until i was certified and joined Scuba Board. I doubt now that i will go back to PADI because with what i want to do with diving i believe PADI cannot offer me the training that i want and/or need.

Also like many have said too that with further education i have looked into instructors more than what i have with organizations because i believe that it is the instructor who makes the course what it is versus the content that is given to them from the organization.
 
I only knew of PADI but did my OW with SSI. Only reason for doing so was convenience and price really. I was on vacation in Australia and only had so many days. I called the two biggest shops in town, one SSI the other PADI, and the SSI one had a class starting right up and was closer to where i was staying.

Since then i've done all other courses with PADI mainly again because its the most readily available in my area.
 
Took my instruction through the University which limited my options, but made it very easy to do since it was a scheduled class and I could do it around my other classes and my work schedule.

For my advanced training that I am thinking about getting I will have to shop the market and see who I like and who's schedule works with mine.

SD
 
I did my open water instruction with a NAUI instructor because NAUI sounded so much cooler than "Patty".
Not really. I made the choice based on attributes of the instructor and shop. When my daughter did her open water, I insisted on a PADI instructor with whom I had dived often.
Ernie Jabour
My instructor was the subject of the South Florida Dive Journal article from which my sig came.
The South Florida Dive Journal

NAUI does still sound cooler than PADI. As does SSI, TDI, GUE etc. I mean what were they thinking. :)
 
Thanks for responding, but bashing PADI due to a bad dive shop is not what I'm doing. The dive shop definitely didn't help the matter, but our primary unhappiness was due to PADI's inflexibility and inability to provide us with any good reason why they wouldn't credit us with a deep dive class taken with another organization. My opinion of their adventure dives is my own and thank you very much, but I'm keeping it.

I expect that by referring to my, "only 1 post", that you are either trying to discourage myself and other new members to scubaboard.com from posting our opinions on discussions, or are trying to invalidate my response because it's ridiculous to think that a person with only one response could ever form a valuable response to another's question. My understanding was that this is supposed to be a friendly discussion zone where, "divers of any skill level may ask questions about basic scuba topics without fear of being accosted".

Not at all....I'm a NEW poster (look at the # of posts I have) within the last three weeks or so but have been around "boards" for at least 5 years. Often on sites people "troll" and will post ONE time "bashing" something and you never see them again. They often have an ulterior motive looking for every forum/board having to do with the topic they are pissed off about. (Do you see why I questioned you now?) If you look back, I'm not the only one who made reference to your statements and your number of posts. I would hope that you CONTINUE to post your opinions, experiences, thoughts, etc. and then be open to others responses to those posts. It was the way your post came across paired with your one post that made me question it.

OUR PADI instructor gave credit to one person in our class that had an SSI dive under his belt, so who knows what happened in your case.(Maybe a bit more background on whether you called PADI to find out why it wouldn't be taken into consideration would have helped.) I'm NOT trying to bash you for your opinions as you are absolutely entitled to them as I'm entitled to mine...I was simply trying to get down to the bottom of your post as it came across as extremely "anti" PADI (and based on my statements above about trollers, maybe you can understand why). We ALL have bad experiences with things. Case in point: I was in the service for 10 years and have had great experiences flying Delta, American Airlines and the old Midwest Express. I was on another board (totally unrelated to diving) where a gal was completely bashing Delta. Turns out she had a bad experience with a flight attendant and was kicked off a flight (and from the article I found in the newspaper she deserved to be kicked off) and that it wasn't the company at all (or even the flight attendant, really). She had one post and was telling everyone "Don't fly Delta!!!" Well, I had a terrible experience flying Continental while in the service while in uniform while on leave from Iraq back in 2003 with a huge bandage around my ankle after driving over an IED and being in the hospital for 10 days....but it was ONE experience and I moved passed it. I've since had plenty of decent experiences with Continental and haven't written them off for that one bad experience because it was the ticket agent that wasn't the best, not the airline. So that is why I was questioning you on whether it was about the instructor/dive shop versus PADI. I could care less about what you feel about PADI...I have no allegiances to any company and will chose my courses (as stated in my other posts) based on the instructor and not the dive company.

As to your "divers of any skill level may ask questions about basic scuba topics without fear of being accosted;" you didn't ask a question; you stated an opinion. Your opinion is now out on a public forum where people are allowed to ask questions about said opinion...and I did just that.
 
I hung out at the LDS when I first started diving and observed. What did I see? Prospective divers wanted a good facility, good pool, separate classroom, clean bathrooms, flexible class times. Cost was often not the biggest consideration but ranks near he top. However scuba class costs in Denver are very similar. The instructor often is not discussed. You will get an instructor based on when your class is scheduled. So IMO facilities, cost, schedule and then the instructor. Cost and facilities may flop flip but honestly schedule will always fall before the instructor. Likely not the order instructors would like!

The only time this is not true is when there is a recommendation from a close friend or relative, or when they are coached by a relative, friend, or boy/girl friend.

A lot of folks just walked in and said sign me up! No tour, no discussion. They may have done research prior, impossible to know.

Most folks do not know what PADI or SSI are, so why would that factor into the decision? In Denver we have twelve +/- LDS and maybe two or three that are not PADI. We have a tech shop and they offer PADI and also GUE for the tech crowd.
 
I had no clue about anything, a friend asked if we wanted to take the class with her and we said sure. (Her husband had already done it with the same guy, someone he worked with.) Happened to be PADI, but this was all 20+ years ago, and a bit harder to research these things. We lucked out.

If I were doing it now I'd be on the net researching it to death, and probably never get around to it due to analysis paralysis.
 
When I first started seriously considering learning to dive 5 or 6 years ago, I googled to find my local options. At that point, all I knew about the different agencies was that PADI and NAUI exist and NASDS doesn't exist anymore (I had read my mom's old NASDS diver manual from the late 70s and laughed about its excessive use of the word "system"). The extent of my consideration of different agencies was seeing if anybody other than PADI was available in my area since all the shops I'd looked at were PADI shops. I didn't find anything, so all my cards are PADI.
 
I am PADI OW and AOW certified. I am going to get my enriched air cert within the next month. I read threads on scubaboard often. I have seen the battles and the agency bashing. It is the instructor that counts. I looked around at different shops before I chose the one I ended up going to. After 4 years I am still going to the same shop. I did a tour of the shop, talked to the personnel and got a good feel for their capabilities even though I knew nothing about scuba training.

I am on scubaboard often. I often read posts of people that are PADI trained saying things like, "I wasn't taught that", "I didn't know that", "That was never mentioned in my class". In most cases I can go to the PADI OW manual and find the topic in the manual. If I think about it, all these things were covered in the class I took, or in the manual. I have come to the conclusion that getting certified is often not only what the instructor has taught but how much effort the student is willing to exert to learn the material presented.

It is difficult to teach people from all walks of life, with all kinds of different ways of actually learning something. In my case, internet based programs are not effective. I still need to learn the way that I was taught in my younger years, read the material, review it in a classroom, then practice it to put it into some semblance of a real application. I admit some are far more efficient at learning by reading it, I need to read it, ask question and apply it before it really sticks. Some learn by reading books, some learn by watching others, the rest learn by peeing on the electric fence for themselves. My point is that there are a lot of different approaches that can be used to teach, not everyone learns the same way.
 
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