Eric Sedletzky
Contributor
If you were to throw out the current structure of the entire scuba industry and re-do it, how would you do it?
Here’s what I would do as a start:
You go to a dive school of your choice. That could be a current agency like PADI, NAUI, SSI, or others. Either an established school or a private certified instructor. You can supplement your training and knowledge with written materials, books, etc. mentors, but you would need a signed training sheet filled out by a certified instructor/instructing agency to get to the next step.
When your skills are good are you are ready, you go to a separate certification agency that is for certification only and you go for your test. There is a pool portion, a written portion, and an open water portion. You book your appointment.
The testing is on a pass or fail basis and there is no cheating. Either you can do the skills and pass the exam or you don’t. And of course there is a fee for the cert test.
The employees of the cert agency are not affiliated with any if the scuba schools, the cert agency is completely independent.
In this environment, the teaching of scuba and the certification would be separated.
This would create the opposite effect of what we have now of the easiest least path of resistance effect. It would create a culture of quality to be sure that students would be able to pass the exams set by the cert agency. Those schools/instructors with crappy teaching and rounding corners would soon be gone because they wouldn’t be training people adequately enough to pass the tests. Their Yelp reviews would suck and nobody would go there.
There was another thread in which a lot of corruption was mentioned within agencies with the idea that it’s the fox guarding the hen house. Having one agency teach AND certify students with no real outside oversight leads to a lot of poor training and a cattle drive of student certifications. I agree with this, I think this does lead to corruption and poorly trained students and the only oversee’er at this point is the legal system in the form of law suits when someone dies or gets maimed, after the fact.
If the industry was broken up and the final certification was issued by a non affiliated agency it would introduce a check and balance system which I think this industry desperately needs.
Discuss.
Here’s what I would do as a start:
You go to a dive school of your choice. That could be a current agency like PADI, NAUI, SSI, or others. Either an established school or a private certified instructor. You can supplement your training and knowledge with written materials, books, etc. mentors, but you would need a signed training sheet filled out by a certified instructor/instructing agency to get to the next step.
When your skills are good are you are ready, you go to a separate certification agency that is for certification only and you go for your test. There is a pool portion, a written portion, and an open water portion. You book your appointment.
The testing is on a pass or fail basis and there is no cheating. Either you can do the skills and pass the exam or you don’t. And of course there is a fee for the cert test.
The employees of the cert agency are not affiliated with any if the scuba schools, the cert agency is completely independent.
In this environment, the teaching of scuba and the certification would be separated.
This would create the opposite effect of what we have now of the easiest least path of resistance effect. It would create a culture of quality to be sure that students would be able to pass the exams set by the cert agency. Those schools/instructors with crappy teaching and rounding corners would soon be gone because they wouldn’t be training people adequately enough to pass the tests. Their Yelp reviews would suck and nobody would go there.
There was another thread in which a lot of corruption was mentioned within agencies with the idea that it’s the fox guarding the hen house. Having one agency teach AND certify students with no real outside oversight leads to a lot of poor training and a cattle drive of student certifications. I agree with this, I think this does lead to corruption and poorly trained students and the only oversee’er at this point is the legal system in the form of law suits when someone dies or gets maimed, after the fact.
If the industry was broken up and the final certification was issued by a non affiliated agency it would introduce a check and balance system which I think this industry desperately needs.
Discuss.
