Reasons why you should not take a course through a dive shop

[beaverdivers]

Because of the frequency of teaching here I have to say that our instructors have their instructional methods down to a science, unlike the some time independent instructor who may teach 2 or 3 ow courses a year.

I believe it is the " SCUBA Instructor " that really makes the difference, independent or facility sponsored.

However, I do know how much background work it takes to properly train students. It may be easier on the instructor if he/she doesn't have to sell the course, fill the tanks, clean the pool, offer extra pool time, etc. An independent may achieve these tasks alone, however it may be be better if the instructor can focus on teaching with the support of a facility.

My wife & I have been in the pool 15 hours this week. We had a special evening teaching together Valentine's Day.

We have been able to offer make-up pool times and extra pool time for our students due to the number of pool sesions available.

Could I have done it by myself as an independent w/o the support of my staff? Yes, but it would not have been as much Fun.

Would the quality of training have been as good? Yes, the instructor is the key element!

I'm off to the pool for another weekend U/W.

I always laugh when our UPS driver says have a nice weekend as if I'm "off" for the weekend.

My answer is always " I certainly will ".

SCUBA is our life as a dedicated SCUBA instructor. No matter if your an independent or work w/ a shop.

 

[TSandM]

One of the ways that you can bring a customer back to a business is by providing such a good product or service that they WANT to come back.

My husband teaches as an independent instructor, and also teaches through a dive shop. He teaches pretty much the same course in both places, but the class through the shop gets more time in a bigger pool, even though there will be a number of students in that space. We have had similar numbers of private and shop students go on to ConEd and to gear purchases. I think the only dissatisfaction we ever feel with the shop classes is that we wish we could use different gear.

 

[wedivebc]

One of the ways that you can bring a customer back to a business is by providing such a good product or service that they WANT to come back.

My husband teaches as an independent instructor, and also teaches through a dive shop. He teaches pretty much the same course in both places, but the class through the shop gets more time in a bigger pool, even though there will be a number of students in that space. We have had similar numbers of private and shop students go on to ConEd and to gear purchases. I think the only dissatisfaction we ever feel with the shop classes is that we wish we could use different gear.

I assume when you are teaching independently you have more flexibility in gear selection which suggests the student will be getting better value for their training dollar in the long run.

 

[BDSC]

I was certified at a local shop back in 91 and more and more I appreciate my instructor and his advice at the time. As we completed our OW class his advice was to now go out and dive for a year or so and don't even think about taking another course until we were sure we were going to stick with diving. He said a lot of people he taught fell in love with the "idea of scuba diving" but never fell in love with actually diving. He had students who were certified and years later they had never done a single dive outside of class. He even told us to wait and buy gear when we were sure we would stick with it and the shop owner agreed with him. Never a hard sell from the shop and to this day they still don't.

I know a few instructors at other local shops who tell me as soon as their students finish the OW class they are telling them when the next AOW class is starting so they can sign up for that. And they are encouraged to talk about the "master scuba diver" rating and how right after they take AOW and Rescue they will only need a few specialties to achieve such a rating.

Maybe that's the new way of doing things or maybe the shop and instructor I went through were just totally out of the norm, but I'm glad I was certified when I was, the shop I used, and the instructor I had or else I may have been sucked into the never ending "take the next class" mentality.

 

[Steve_C]

Its the instructor and not the affiliation.

I took a dry suit course. I had no intention of buying one in the near future but thought I might want to rent one when diving in colder locations so wanted some training. The course gave me the chance to use one of the LDS dry suits, do two dives, and get a lot of instruction. A whole days worth. I learned a lot. One of the things was was that while I did ok in the dry suit there was no way I was going to dive in a new location with a strange dry suit without lots more dry suit time. Potential for too much task loading. Lesson worth the money. I have several buddies with dry suits (but no spare i my size) but don't see how I could have gotten the same knowledge as quickly.

 

[Quero]

What I believe shops should be (and do) anno 2013 is to offer facilities. Gear rentals, agreements with pools for rental times, sales and consumables (air etc).

Shops should *charge* instructors for organising these services and allow instructors to offer their own courses based on hiring these services from the shop. Discounts and agency interfacing can also be organized by the shop, for minimal overhead.

This way individual instructors can pull as hard as they want on any of the three corners of the time-quality-money triangle and the shop can offer an variety of options for students with different needs.

However, this is a serious paradigm shift for many shops (and instructors) and although I see this happening around me, we haven't navigated this corner yet.

R..

I feel particularly fortunate to have stumbled upon an independent operation (two guys) which A. does not retail any equipment and has no retail store front to keep afloat Ha! pun. I have to admit I really really like their whole approach and will be doing my AOW and Nitrox through them.

I've read this thread with interest, and since we've had significant input from Europe and North America, let me weigh in from Asia and describe my own approach, which, while perhaps not the most typical model here, is far from uncommon.

What I do is very much like what Rob outlines and what Kev appreciates. Although by law I have a fully-registered dive business so in one sense I'm a "shop," I don't have a shopfront or a retail store, so in another I'm "independent." I have cooperative arrangements with a variety of dive-related businesses to support my teaching. I don't have to have a stock of student manuals since I can just go pick them up at trade price as I need them; I have only the smallest inventory of equipment for sale (at the moment 5 masks, 2 pairs of fins, and one dive computer) since I can just walk into the distributors' showrooms here with my divers, talk them through their options, and earn a commission on the sale; I don't have a large classroom with a video theatre since I teach one-on-one and I can just pop the DVD into a personal viewer and hand it to the student, but if I do get a group, I can just reserve a classroom from a number of different places for a small fee; I don't have an enormous pool--mine will fit two or three divers--but if I need a bigger one, I can easily just pay a daily rate at a huge pool affiliated with a hotel near here; I take the five tanks I use for pool and shore dives to a local filling station whose sole business is filling tanks (yes, they make a profit) rather than running/maintaining a compressor myself; I book space on local boats at student rates and go aboard at no additional cost along with my students.

It works. Each element of the dive industry here relies on the other, from the tank filling guy to the boat operators to the equipment sales places. Very few try to do it all--the equipment stores don't offer courses for the most part, the training places don't stock much major gear, the boats don't have retail equipment outlets (though they might have a few things on display, particularly dive computers, masks, and fins), and so on. One big umbrella company here--one that was a scuba pioneer on the island back in the day and started out with a grass shack on the beach--has evolved in much the way I presume that Rob envisions, and is actually a corporation with training facilities under one brand, retail and wholesale outlets under separate brands, a liveaboard (originally in Thailand, but now in Indonesia) under a fourth brand, a day boat under a fifth brand, and a hotel on top of it all. Each one of these subsidiary businesses cooperates with any other dive business on the island--their dayboat will accept divers from other training facilities, their wholesale shop sells to any retail operation or independent at trade prices, their hotel takes in non-divers (!), and so on.

What I do need, as an independent, is a stock of rental gear, a library of instructor materials like all the DVDs, extras like dive lights for night diving training, compasses for nav, emergency oxygen and the reg set next to my pool, etc. that some of my colleagues who teach only through bigger training facilities don't have to provide on their own. I can recall being shocked at how much initial capital expenditure it took for me to get the basics for those things, but now it's just a matter of replacement and maintenance for equipment and updated materials for teaching (e.g., I have to budget for the new EFR stuff that has just come in here).

I will say, though, that from a prospective student's perspective, it's harder to sell a course as an independent than it is as a shop. Somehow students are wary that if we're not formal employees of a brick-and-mortar store we're somehow unreliable, fly-by-night instructors. I've been glad to be able to reassure some of my divers that my business here, though in some sense "independent" is actually a formally registered dive operation according to the Ministry of Commerce and that my banks have enough confidence in my business to award me with a credit card merchant number. Sometimes it takes a lot of convincing to keep a student interested in working with me rather than going to the shop that by dint of having a store appears to be more legitimate.

 

[TSandM]

I assume when you are teaching independently you have more flexibility in gear selection which suggests the student will be getting better value for their training dollar in the long run.

Yes, we have more flexibility in gear, which means we can use what WE like. But the flip side is that the students don't get that huge deep end of the pool to spend six class sessions in, with good CAs, to practice being divers. I love the big pool, and wish we could afford to rent it for our private students, but it's not feasible.

 

[openmindOW]

I took a dry suit course. I had no intention of buying one in the near future but thought I might want to rent one when diving in colder locations so wanted some training. The course gave me the chance to use one of the LDS dry suits, do two dives, and get a lot of instruction. A whole days worth. I learned a lot.

Personally, I think new divers can learn a lot from specialty classes, even shortclasses.

I did.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Would you want a professional who does their craft on a continual basis,pretty much day in and out, or one who only does their craft once or twice a year and has limited exposure to different situations that some other instructors may find difficult?

I would want an instructor who knows how to teach, and who does enough diving outside of the class environment to understand the difference between the course material and what actually happens in the real world. Classes are an artificial environment, and instructors who spend their entire time doing classes tend to get into a "checklist" mentality ... mistaking this for efficiency.

Every diver who comes through your class is unique. Some will be quite talented and learn quickly. Others will struggle ... often with issues that have more to do with their emotional or mental inhibitions than the skills themselves. Most will lie somewhere in between.

I would want an instructor who understands how to look at what a person is actually doing, and assess whether this person is learning and understanding the skill, or are they instead simply parroting what they see before them at the moment? I'd want an instructor who would insist on me doing a skill over and over until I demonstrated not just that I could manage it, but that I was comfortable managing it ... because in the real world avoiding something like a mask clear because I "hated" it in class might lead to bigger issues ... and avoiding stress by being comfortable with your skills is the real objective.

Independent or LDS employee is irrelevent. Frequency of teaching can be irrelevent. Number of certs is irrelevent. What matters is how an instructor assesses "mastery" ... and whether or not they understand that there are no "standard" solutions for teaching that work well for everyone. How much time the class takes shouldn't depend on teaching style ... but it should absolutely depend on how much the student struggles, or how much practice they require to "master" the skills. People who brag about how "efficient" they are in a pool session are usually just rationalizing their own tendency to rush students through a checklist of skills, without a whole lot of thought to whether or not the student is comfortable enough with them to be able to apply them once the class is over.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[TSandM]

Interesting that you don't like "being efficient", Bob. One of the things we really like about the way we've been running the group classes is the efficiency. But what we view as efficiency is making the amount of time the student spends demonstrating skills to the instructor as short as it can be and get it done -- then the student has MORE time to swim in the deep end, and demonstrate those skills repeatedly to the CAs (usually in midwater) until they are really confirmed with them.