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Red Flags or Misplaced Expectations?
- Thread starter Dan G
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I personally think it is rude to ask someone how much they make. No matter what at the end of that conversation one person is going to walk away pissed off. I won't ask a coworker how much they make and will not answer a coworker if they ask me. The deal I have with my employer is my private business nobody else.
This sub forum is called 'thinking about a diving career'. It's pretty stupid talk about any career without knowing what you can make and what the costs are. A lack of transparency is great for the employers and bad for employees... for obvious reasons.
I know what most of my old buddies from university make that work in same industry as I do. It's good to be informed about what's worse what in a given market. Wanting to remain ignorant to protect your ego sounds pretty silly.
I totally get why CDs/ITs and shop owner don't want that info out. Negotiating anything is best when the other person isn't well informed.
I don't understand why random divers feel the need to defend a company like PADI that's owned by some investment group.
A google search is pretty easy and can get you the information on average pay for a particular industry and region of the world. There have been plenty of threads here on SB about it. Pestering somebody about their pay is rude not transparency. All the shops I've worked with were pretty up front about what they pay per student or per class but any other deals I had with them are my business. If other instructors or DM's had different deals with the shop, good on them and not my business.
I never found it an issue when people asked how much I made working for a shop. When I go back to teaching, I'll go into all my costs with them and then calculate my hourly rate.
Yeah, great, like this one where people who never worked in the industry praise the career opportunities that a one week PADI/SSI IDC gives you.
People like you, that are arguing against transparency, are part of the problem. Let's better not think about why employee turnover is super high.
People like me? You have no idea who I am or what I stand for but you are good at bashing people sitting behind your keyboard. I'm for transparency but also for personal privacy. If I'm the problem and the cause of the downfall of the scuba industry that's pretty impressive as I didn't know I had that much power. The big issue is that scuba is a niche market and will stay that way it is not important to most and that frustrates the scuba fanatics!
So I have to agree someone who is on my ignore list.
I think one of the problems for those of us who have been in the industry a while and are not sycophants to our respective agencies is that there is a bit of sales pitch for ocean front property in Nevada. When I did my IDC, there was such a push for selling the next class before they even finished their open water class. I would watch students when the shop owner was making the agency pitch for equipment and courses and I could see how they are turned off. The regional director was talking about how much money can be made from teaching PPB (his wife did apparently). Well, when you look at PPB, the performance requirements are not much different than open water. I discuss that here and here. I think this push for more classes is really disingenuous. While quick/cheap classes are good for the agency, they are not good for the instructor or more importantly, the customer. The shops/instructors that teach properly, and charge accordingly, have much higher retention rates (I'm referring to Jade Scuba, 8, and Off the Hook). But you can't be a used car salesman in a cheap suit (I called the owner of the first shop I taught at a used Fiat salesman to his face).
The industry lacks integrity and it is hard for me to choose an agency. Who has the largest shred of integrity? Who is the lessor of all evils? As there are issues with even the agencies where I recommend courses (and no, I'm not getting into that here. You'd have to get me rather drunk at DEMA before I open my mouth)
There is never a discussion about costs of insurance, rates of return, actual numbers of compensation for courses. The first shop I taught, you would earn $75 per student in open water where dry suit was included. In the next shop where it wasn't, it was $50 per student. Now this was only if they were certified. For the second shop, it would be $25 for getting them through academics and the pool session. I don't know about the first shop, as I was a horrible instructor back then who taught on the knees, and everyone passed, even when because the equipment provided sucked so bad, I had to have one student breath off my alternate when she did the mask removal, replacement, and clear. I told the CD what I did and he said it met performance requirements (in hindsight, I should have known better - and I know I'll get skewered now by some folks - hey, I've learned, m'kay?).
You are far better off putting your money that you would pay for training to become a dive pro in the stock market and working another job and just diving for fun.
I do consider myself a scuba fanatic, but I don't care that scuba diving is unimportant to 99.99999% of the world's population. I am frustrated however by the lack of transparency and ethics.
If I wasn't going to open a dive center in Greece, becoming a dive pro would be the worst financial decision I made in my life.
I have never been shy about saying that in my years teaching scuba working for a shop I was seriously underpaid most of the time. The problem with specifying exact pay is that there are so many variables in both the way people are paid and the specific circumstances leading to that pay. For example, if instructors are paid $25 per student for weekend pool and academic sessions, if they have 8 students, that comes to $200 for that weekend, roughly $12 per hour, which used to be above minimum wage. If they had 4 students, that came to $100, which is below the (then) minimum wage. There were times my per pupil pay got me to less than $2 per hour.
The last shop's instructional director said they did not have to pay minimum wage because we might get tips that would bring it up to minimum wage. I said that instructors rarely get tips, and under the law, if an employee does not make minimum wage with tips, the employer had to make up the difference. He said he did not know that. Nothing changed. (I went independent after that.)
The last shop's instructional director said they did not have to pay minimum wage because we might get tips that would bring it up to minimum wage. I said that instructors rarely get tips, and under the law, if an employee does not make minimum wage with tips, the employer had to make up the difference. He said he did not know that. Nothing changed. (I went independent after that.)
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