Should Cert Cards be for life? My cert cards seem to be worthless!
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drrich2
Contributor
Sure, you want to make the most money you can in business. My point is that a one stop temporary diver is not necessarily a bad thing for the scuba industry, if he's some 'type' who was never going to make a long-term diver regardless of what was done. At least some LDS snagged an OW course cost, and somebody got the profit for selling fins, mask & snorkel.
Best case scenario: your student becomes a regular. Worst case (for the business, maybe not the student); he never took the course or bought any gear at all.
Richard.
Best case scenario: your student becomes a regular. Worst case (for the business, maybe not the student); he never took the course or bought any gear at all.
Richard.
flots am
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IANAL, but I suspect my liability is less if I take the card at face value than if I decide to be the arbiter of who's qualified to dive.
flots.
drrich2
Contributor
If you decide who can dive independently of certification, and don't take the card at face value, and this is formally evident, in the event of a bad outcome for a diver you let dive, you had better be able to show your means of establishing competence for the dive, justify it, and show staff adhered to your policy (even if your policy was solely at shop discretion & not required by law).
Our culture at work. Reminds me of the health care system; if a hospital creates a policy, not required by any law, hoping to improve patient care, and a regulatory agency (e.g.: CMS or Joint Commission) does a survey and determines that you did not follow your own policy in a given case, you can get in trouble. A scuba dive boat op. is not a hospital; I suspect the business operator needs to be mindful of similar concerns.
My point is, in trying to improve customer safety, you might inadvertently increase your liability exposure and documentation burden, while alienating some customers you don't think perform at the level of their certification.
Richard.
I concur and Bret Gilliam discusses reasons that are consistent with my much more limited exposure to the diving population. One, a problem with the current training paradigm, is too many people scare themselves due to inadequate training at the technical understanding and habituation levels. This really should be part 1 of his article:
Dive Training Today, A Perspective by Bret Gilliam, Diver Magazine
Two is the practical aspects of life. Young people start diving and life gets in the way until kids grow and careers mature. Shifting priorities. Diving takes time and money.
I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, that seems to be the approach of a lot of diver training organizations. Sure there are other reasons for droputs, but these two have lots of similar variants. A formal study would be interesting but I doubt that these two are irrelevant. Either way, any opportunity for a retailer to establish a dialog with customers with a demonstrated potential of being the “right people” has to be more productive than finding new candidates.
A 70% dropout rate, which represents a major loss of customers and that all-important silent and free sales force for diving.
Actually, McDonald's loses money if they attract a person that only eats there once. The acquisition cost of a new customer far exceeds the profit on a "one and done" customer. But of course, McDonald's is in a high-volume, low-margin business so they don't look at a per-customer/transaction basis. Scuba is the opposite. Which is why a "one and done" diver should be acceptable to the industry. The problem is that the industry doesn't discriminate between different prospective customers nor do they treat them differently.
It's really not hard to segment and approach customers differently. A smart marketer would recognize that the lifetime value of a "bucket list" diver, though attractive, is much lower than that of the "life-long" diver. Accordingly they would also make different investment allocations to attract and maintain them. Spend very little to attract bucket-list people... and zero to try to keep them. Spend a lot to attract "life long" divers... and modestly to keep them. The problem is when you refuse to accept that they are different, refuse to treat them differently, and don't modify expectations of the different groups.
---------- Post added January 24th, 2015 at 11:46 PM ----------
This is one reason that the industry should STOP attracting people with a high propensity to drop out. Those people become a "counter-sales force" when they tell people "yeah, I tried diving once... it was just OK." Yes, you may have made $100 profit on that guy. But you lose $100 for every person they dissuade from diving.
gcarter
Contributor
Lets be clear: a cert is not a license. It is not required to dive. It is an attestation to your completion of a training regime, nothing more.
Talk about requiring a re-cert is the height of silliness without a system to enforce it, and in the absence of a license I fail to see what that could possibly be.
Talk about a license - don't go there. Not unless you also want to require one for rock climbing and skiing and zip lining and.... no, even then, don't go there. Stupidity.
It is also analogous, to me, to requiring I re-qualify in some way for my BA and MBA because there is new stuff out there. Dude, I did the education, the training, the diploma / cert attests to that, and does nothing else, pretends to do nothing else. Any dive op is free to ask to see my log book if they want to see what my ongoing experience is, and they can even ask me to do a checkout dive if they please. Happens every day, all over the world. Just like an employer can ask to see evidence of CPE hours. But they have no right to take my cert / diploma.
If you don't like the quality of the dive ops you choose or how they treat you, change your selection criteria. I have personally had enough of the nanny stater's penchant for imposing burdens on others every time they see something they don't like. I have never run into what you describe. Don't create unnecessary burdens for me.
Find a real problem to fix.
Talk about requiring a re-cert is the height of silliness without a system to enforce it, and in the absence of a license I fail to see what that could possibly be.
Talk about a license - don't go there. Not unless you also want to require one for rock climbing and skiing and zip lining and.... no, even then, don't go there. Stupidity.
It is also analogous, to me, to requiring I re-qualify in some way for my BA and MBA because there is new stuff out there. Dude, I did the education, the training, the diploma / cert attests to that, and does nothing else, pretends to do nothing else. Any dive op is free to ask to see my log book if they want to see what my ongoing experience is, and they can even ask me to do a checkout dive if they please. Happens every day, all over the world. Just like an employer can ask to see evidence of CPE hours. But they have no right to take my cert / diploma.
If you don't like the quality of the dive ops you choose or how they treat you, change your selection criteria. I have personally had enough of the nanny stater's penchant for imposing burdens on others every time they see something they don't like. I have never run into what you describe. Don't create unnecessary burdens for me.
Find a real problem to fix.
Good thread. A couple of thoughts hit me. one post 16 was great. Doesnt one have the right to be protected from a situation that could lead to a suit.
This reminds me of so many threads about OW is good to 130. Slightly differrent applilcaton as we are talking about profiecency as opposed to training. The end result is the same. The lack of adaquate skills either from not having to begin with or from not using them. The untrained or the too long away from diving does not belong on certain dives. I kind of like the idea of renewing/expiring the certification. IE the OW would be good for 1 or 2 years and you better move on to an AOW cert that may be good for say 3 or 4 years. All done to force out the one time divers, the long absence, high risk divers. Of course from OW to AOW would have to change to say 50 dives so you cant do both certs on a weekend as a means of doing an end around.. Master diver should be regarded as not necessary to renew based on the dives required ect. to obtain the cert. Likewise The DM ect. Again the only way to enforce it would be at the local level and having a qualified DM or something submit a renewal request. We know how that goes. Renewals for sale. It has to happen because as alluded to throughout this thread all that has been talked about or around in the financial impact on those that have a fiacal intrest in scuba. From the quick read of the other posts i do not recall a mention of the divers personal safety as opposed to 70% drop out and its ipact on empty boat seats or additional chances to sell gear. Personally if someone has not been in the water (and how would you know) for such a long time i dont want them buddied with me at 100 ft. As to proving one has maintained skills via continued diving how does anyone know how many times one has dove. lakes do not have resident DM's available to sign or submit renewal recommendations. One can not go by a log book cause that is just self generated paper. So would the plan be yo have to take a Dm 10 times per year with you before a renewal is recommended. I would guess that would be 500$/ 10 dives for DM buddy fees to get 10 sig's and a email sent to the agency. Cheaper to just do the AOW class.....And then oh crap I used a nauii dm and I have a padi card. How does padi verify the nauii DM status. It would be a night mare. If you do 2 yrs and the Ow card is dead then another business starts up making counterfiet cards. If you do a renewal process then life gets a lot brighter for all the dms that currently work for tips. Still no solution.
This reminds me of so many threads about OW is good to 130. Slightly differrent applilcaton as we are talking about profiecency as opposed to training. The end result is the same. The lack of adaquate skills either from not having to begin with or from not using them. The untrained or the too long away from diving does not belong on certain dives. I kind of like the idea of renewing/expiring the certification. IE the OW would be good for 1 or 2 years and you better move on to an AOW cert that may be good for say 3 or 4 years. All done to force out the one time divers, the long absence, high risk divers. Of course from OW to AOW would have to change to say 50 dives so you cant do both certs on a weekend as a means of doing an end around.. Master diver should be regarded as not necessary to renew based on the dives required ect. to obtain the cert. Likewise The DM ect. Again the only way to enforce it would be at the local level and having a qualified DM or something submit a renewal request. We know how that goes. Renewals for sale. It has to happen because as alluded to throughout this thread all that has been talked about or around in the financial impact on those that have a fiacal intrest in scuba. From the quick read of the other posts i do not recall a mention of the divers personal safety as opposed to 70% drop out and its ipact on empty boat seats or additional chances to sell gear. Personally if someone has not been in the water (and how would you know) for such a long time i dont want them buddied with me at 100 ft. As to proving one has maintained skills via continued diving how does anyone know how many times one has dove. lakes do not have resident DM's available to sign or submit renewal recommendations. One can not go by a log book cause that is just self generated paper. So would the plan be yo have to take a Dm 10 times per year with you before a renewal is recommended. I would guess that would be 500$/ 10 dives for DM buddy fees to get 10 sig's and a email sent to the agency. Cheaper to just do the AOW class.....And then oh crap I used a nauii dm and I have a padi card. How does padi verify the nauii DM status. It would be a night mare. If you do 2 yrs and the Ow card is dead then another business starts up making counterfiet cards. If you do a renewal process then life gets a lot brighter for all the dms that currently work for tips. Still no solution.
That was my knee-jerk reaction as well before reading the full article. I was impressed enough to E-mail Bret to congratulate him quite unlike an old-school curmudgeon like me. Like I wrote above, it isnt about mandating retraining for active divers. It is more about an opportunity to market to occasional and dropout divers and make them a little safer at the same time.
There is no way that dive boat operators, air fill stations, and dive resorts are going to require it any time soon. Either way, active divers will just get a nod from their LDS with a card attached.
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