A recent thread got me thinking about what people expect when it comes to learning to become a diver. Firstly we need to decide on 'What makes a diver?' For me, a diver is self-sufficient, has some experiences in a range of conditions and can perform basic rescue on themselves and their buddy. They are not Cousteau, however they can perform in 'typical' conditions and can adapt appropriately if the conditions worsen.
If you personally disagree with this definition, that's OK but for the purpose of the thread, let's please assume that this is the definition.
This training has been broken up (modularised) by the popular recreational training agencies (PADI, SSI etc), so that not all the training needs to be done at one time. This in turn means that people can complete portions of the training while 'on vacation' and this led to a boom in recreational diving, which led in turn to dive centers opening in thousands of popular holiday destinations around the world.
However, again for this thread lets assume that all this training is done together (ie. no time constraints). A complete beginner walks in to a dive center and walks out as a 'diver', with the aforementioned skill set.
I'd be interested in hearing what beginner divers believe should be the cost of learning to become a diver. $500? $5000? No equipment purchases- just the training.
Just judging from my own experience as an instructor, I can produce a diver fitting just about any definition of competency with about 15-20 hours of in-water instruction, 10-12 hours of theory instruction and maybe 10-15 OW dives. Some instructors who are more efficient can probably do it faster than this. There are also some people who can't learn it at this tempo but they are far and away the exceptions if you have this much time.
Translating that into hours then you're looking at about 30 hours of basic instruction and let's say 7 whole days of diving, which for the instructor is another .... let's call it 60 hours of effort,... for a total of about 90 hours of total effort. Using a wage of $10/hr as a basic starting point then the cost of instruction, not including pool time and equipment is somewhere around $900 for a "perfect world" course. This cost is also easily split 4 ways (an ideal size for a group, if you ask me)
In reality, when I was working for a shop we did courses with an "average" duration from start to finish of about 40 hours at the OW level, which included about 7-odd hours of in water training. I found this tempo to be quite high in many cases and resulted in certifying too many what I would consider "marginal" beginners. In my opinion about 80% of people can learn to dive well enough for the OW cert in 40 hours. The problem in the real world is that shops often do nothing (or too little) for the other 20% in order to deliver adequate quality for those divers who can't learn at that pace.
I quit teaching at the LDS when they introduced a "new" "streamlined" OW course that basically cut down the amount of time for the OW course from 40 to just under 30 hours. At that tempo, you see a clear switch from 80% do fine and 20% need remedial in-water time to a situation whereby the only students who actually learn to dive adequately at this pace are ones who could have learned it on their own by reading the book and watching some youtube videos.
So all of this introduction is to present the case that a high-level quality norm will require more than 40 hours of training and probably up to double that.
So what should it cost? 90 hours of instructor time is going to run you about $1000 if you pay the instructor round-about minimum wage (about double what many instructors actually get paid by shops). Add to that about $250 for pool time and that's the cost you're going to run as a group. If you split it 4 ways (ideal group size) then each student pays about $300 (let's call it $350) per student. But we're not done yet, because equipment rentals for the ideal course are going to run you about $500 by the time all is said and done, which means that each student is going to need to invest arount $800-850 for the "ideal" OW course. Call that $1000 for a bit of profit and to deal with unforeseen events and that's about the most you should expect to pay for a highest quality OW course.
That's obviously too much to ask for OW training so what I do now that I'm freelancing is something else and it has to do strictly with keeping costs down. Most shops offer the OW course including equipment for about $350 where I live (actually € but lets call it $). That includes all the materials, 5 sessions in the pool and all the pool gear + 2 days of check out dives plus the gear. They literally would lose money on that if they paid their instructors. So what I do I sign them up for that, charge them a bit over the $350 to cover my expenses and use that as the foundation. Then I add pool dives to it as necessary depending on what the student needs to learn it well and I increased the number of OW dives from 4 to 10 at the added expense of 2 days of equipment rentals plus the commitment to make 2 extra days and 2 longer days. It requires me to keep the groups small (max 4) and logistics tight so the training days don't drag on but for students who want better training it's a good approach because you get a LOT more bottom time in real world diving conditions than a standard courses offer. Ultimately, it's my experience that the more "real world" learning a student gets the better they can dive at the end of the day.
Obviously this makes my course more expensive than a standard shop course (without being ridiculous) but allows me to offer high-quality training by "piggybacking" on what the shop offers. Fortunately I found a good partner for it who sees that my approach and his can exist side-by-side because we're not competing for the same "type" of student... he also sees the results when my students become active divers (many of the shop's students will only dive on vacations) and buy gear, con-ed, and trips that the shop offers, and so forth. I'm still not making minimum wage teaching but at least now I'm teaching diving in a such way that I can take pride in the results and really deliver what I promised.
For con-ed I don't go through the shop at all but I'm only able to teach students who have their own gear.
R..
