Today's OW Course

[Kingpatzer]

And exactly how do they get that death grip other than having a better business model than the next guy? (Let me guess it has to do with China).

A business model based on abusing market forces that one controls by one sheer dint of size is not 'better,' except within the context of a very limited wall street mentality.

Is abusing employment law as a means of saving money a "better" business practice (go see the case in MN where they were found to have knowingly violated state employment law over a million times.)

Home Depot put a lot of overpriced Mom and Pop hardware stores out of business. Their business plan was to complain about Home Depot.

No, their business plan was to try to offer the same services they have always offered. They didn't change their standards in response to the lower costs and service offered by Home Depot.

In terms of this discussion, it would be the same as an agency continuing to offer longer, more costly training to the average entry diver. You're proving my point for me, btw.

Other Mom and Pop hardware stores (including some chains that turned themselves into Mom and Pop hardware stores) compete quite nicely by being niche players.

Again, thanks for making my point.

They no longer try to sell everything that Home Depot sells and they are prospering quite nicely...perhaps that would be a better approach for NAUI...playing the victim isn't working.

You confuse recognizing the reality of dominating forces in an imbalanced market devoid of necessary conditions for consumers to make fully informed choices (or often not even having choices based on locale) as "playing the victim."

I don't see the organizations whining that they can't survive. I see many of them trying very hard to maintain their niche and some are doing quite well at that. But the issue isn't if NAUI or SEI or CMAS or whoever can survive. The issue is if the training the average dive student is likely to obtain is adequate for their safety and the good of the sport as a whole.

In spending your time describing those who, not knowing better, purchase such training as idiots who deserve whatever fate befalls upon them demonstrates your position quite nicely. I recognize that you attempt to back track, but the end result is still that you are talking about individual instances while the rest of us are talking about populations.

Individual responsibility is all well and good. I'm not saying that any PADI instructor who has a student die or be injured due to poor training should be punished. Yes, the individual diver is responsible for themselves. What I and others are saying is that the population of divers is inadequately trained as a result of how the market is working across the population.

 

[gcbryan]

I actually wonder if that's the main motivation, Bob. It's probably part of the equation, but the way I see it, when it gets down to brass tacks everyone wants to be safe. The fact that they'll accept minimal training has to do with a peculiarity in human nature. Nearly everyone thinks they're better than average. Better looking than average, smarter than average, better than average dRivers .... etc etc.. you get the picture...

So why does this trait lead to people accepting minimal training? Simply because students aren't buying "training". They're buying "access". They want the card, not the process, so if they can get to that goal faster and cheaper somewhere else they'll do it and pressure on time and budget for training is huge. Why don't most people want to buy "training"? Because they're the same overconfident ones who think they're better than average dRivers and they'll be able to sort out the wrinkles as they go....

In other words, they don't want to buy training not because they want "fast and cheap" but for the simple reason that they don't think they *need* training.... but they know they *need* the card.

R..

Good point regarding it mainly being about needing the card. The real problem may also be that the worse the training becomes the more the student is right...why pay any more for that?

It's like the PADI specialties...why would anyone pay any more than they had too since once you take one of those classes you really do feel that you could have learned just as much on your own.

 

[DCBC]

I hear you DCBC for sure. I just wonder if all of the other agencies other than PADI trying to compete with a PADI OW class for $200 by countering with $300 but telling the prospective student...but we're better ... trust us...were to offer a much better and much more expensive class wouldn't have better luck.

That's how I remember it before PADI had its foothold. Instructors would brag about how high their agencies standards were. That's changed.

What if every other agency only had a $500 OW class that lasted twice as long...in other words a meaningful difference. Then perhaps prospective students would ask more questions as in why are all other classes twice as expensive and maybe there is a good reason for that. Then maybe you would get some of the more serious students.

If every organization would double their standards and all course fees were doubled, the result would be better trained and safer divers. PADI lowered the bar and the masses flocked to them. We can't expect a non-diver to know what's good for them. That is a moral responsibility of those that offer the training in the first-place.

That's not the way it goes now. You go to a NAUI shop for instance and they charge you just a little more but tell you that they are better. That's not very persuasive but charging over twice as much would cause students to ask PADI to explain how they can do it for so much less than everyone else. It might wake the students up.

Perhaps you're right, but it didn't work for me. people think that they're getting ripped off. Keep in-mind that they don't know. PADI must be a respected organization; it's the largest in the world...

I don't think anyone is going to change PADI. They don't want to change but for every other agency that does want to change I think they can if they approach it right.

I truly hope so. Thanks for your comments.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Of course every new diver wants to buddy up with a more experienced diver. I felt the same way. But why would an experienced buddy want to dive with me? In fact, the group I dove with in Singapore was already buddied up. They had no interest in diving with me. I'm not complaining; over time I felt the same way. Still do. As the newest member, I was the one that got stuck with the tourists.

So, I took OW I, OW II, Advanced OW and Rescue back-to-back. The only experienced diver that would dive with me was my instructor. That's ok! The only diver I thought had enough experience to meet my criteria WAS my instructor. It turns out that my buddy-to-be took the same program at the same time and we went on to dive all over the world - Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Maldives and the California coast.

I'm not an instructor, it's not my job to hold another diver's hand while they learn the skills necessary to survive. Further, I'm not qualified nor do I want the responsibility/liability. Moreover, why would a new diver want to learn my bad habits?

Perhaps it's a regional distinction but my experiences as a new diver (in the Seattle area) were completely different than your own.

While it is true that there are many experienced divers who do not want to dive with newbies (and therefore shouldn't) it is equally true that there are a LOT of experienced divers who enjoy taking newer divers out and helping them develop their diving skills. I still do, as do a great many of my regular dive buddies. In fact, for many of us, it's a "pay it forward" motivation, as we remember the great mentors who helped us become the divers we are today.

Perhaps it's due to the fact that where I live, access to diving is easy ... and there's no exceptional cost involved in shore diving ... but over the years I have found no shortage of talented and experienced divers who really enjoy diving with newly certified OW divers ... among the satisfactions is the "gleam" they bring back into things we've since taken for granted ...

(newb) "HOLY COW ... WHAT IS THAT THING"?
(me) ... "It's a decorator crab" ... (grin)

After a coupla thousand dives, I found that diving with newbs helped me stay in touch with all the reasons why I got into diving in the first place.

Instructors always say that "Only qualified instructors can teach diving" and then, when the all important first dives come around, they want nothing to do with their students until they somehow manage to survive the first 25 dives. Yes, I call that abdicating!

I think you're misconstruing what was said ... it has nothing to do with "come back after you've got 25 dives" ... it has everything to do with "You'll get way more out of the next class after you've had a chance to assimilate what you've learned in this one".

This instructor has never said that "only qualified instructors can teach diving" ... because I don't believe that for a moment. Some of the most important things I learned about diving came not from a class, but from diving with more experienced divers ... and throughout my diving lifetime I've never had trouble finding more experienced people to dive with me. Even today ... I'm a very new cave diver, looking forward to doing my very first unsupervised cave dive in a few weeks when I return to Florida. And yet when I posted on this and other forums looking for dive buddies to take a newb into the caves I got an overwhelming response. That experience is invaluable ... at ANY level ... if you truly want to get everything you can out of the next class you take, because your brain can only process so much information at once, and if you're struggling with the new skills you learned in your last class you simply aren't going to have much bandwidth for the ones you need to learn in the next class.

Keep teaching! Encourage every new diver to immediately take either Advanced OW or one of the diving specialties. Keep them engaged and keep providing competent training. That's the way to create safe divers.

That's one way, but not the only way ... and certainly not the best way. The real learning comes from diving ... not from taking classes. Classes are, by definition, an artificial environment where students are engaging a large part of their concentration not on diving, but on trying to meet a specific skill thatthey think the instructor wants to see. That's not real diving, and it rarely teaches you how to integrate the skills you're learning into a real-world diving situation. It's teaching you the mechanics ... but not the art ... of diving. To be a competent and safe diver, you need both.

Perhaps the manner in which you learned is how you ended up with those bad habits you mentioned previously in the first place ...

Club training just doesn't happen in the US. There are clubs and there may be more advanced divers helping the newcomers. But there is no requirement to join a club. And there is no requirement that club members train newbies. Maybe it happens, probably it doesn't.

In other countries, dive instruction is routinely undertaken by clubs. BSAC comes to mind. That is NOT the US model. Our training is strictly commercial.

I was initially certified through a YMCA program, and my instructor pretty much insisted that I get some diving experience prior to moving on to AOW. In hindsight I found it to be excellent advice. Now, granted, the YMCA wasn't your typical OW program. The class was four weeks ... eight hours per week ... before we did our OW checkout dives, so I felt reasonably prepared by the end of class to plan and execute dives on my own. And, indeed, my first few dives were at a local dive park with one of my OW classmates. We did fine ... and within a few weeks we'd acquired more experienced dive buddies just from the folks we met at the park. Also, there are several local dive clubs here that are very active, and we were encouraged to join one (which we did). Most of these clubs have a program to hook new divers up with more experienced club members for mentoring. I'm currently a member of one of them that has what we refer to as a "Big Buddy" program for exactly that purpose. And whether it's with a club or something less formal, I firmly believe that mentoring is as important to dive skills development as formal education. I encourage all my students to find and dive with a mentor. I also actively seek to help them find mentors they can dive with once class is completed.

Mentoring is, and always has been, a mainstay of diver development. I don't see that changing anytime soon ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[rstofer]

That doesn't mean a responsible community allows idiots to continue to endanger themselves and others. Drunks go to jail because some idiocy is simply not tolerable. When the "idiocy" involves systematized inadequacies in training for a dangerous hobby, there's a problem that goes beyond the individual consumer.

This comparison is invalid. A drunk driver will very probably kill someone not involved with them. A poor diver will most likely kill themselves or someone volunteering to dive with them. That's why drunk driving is illegal and unqualified diving is not.

Everyone keeps saying, as though it is FACT, that PADI training is inadequate. Prove it!

You can't even break the DAN statistics down by agency! Maybe it's only CMAS divers that are dying. Or NAUI...

Of the total number of fatalities, PROVE which ones were caused by inadequate training and not caused by other factors: too much experience, too old, too fat, etc.

Think about the 'fact' that 52% of fatalities involve divers with more than 10 years experience. You sure can't put that off on PADI.

Eighty-two percent of fatalities involve divers over 40. What? PADI should institute an age limit? It's pretty clear the local governments should!

Seventy-four percent of fatalities involve drivers with excess BMI. PADI should clearly eliminate fat people from their programs. I think I read that a HUGE percentage of the US population is obese. Sure cuts down on perspective students!

Every PADI OW diver has the opportunity to take additional training. Now, I realize some instructors don't want to teach advanced programs to their OW students until the student has somehow survived 25 or more unsupervised dives, but the opportunity is there, eventually. It is up to the instructors to prove to the students that additional training is desirable. And in this they fail miserably. Well, actually, from the PADI statistics, I can't really prove that either. But, hey, facts aren't all that important in this thread.

Every diver should take OW, AOW, Deep, Search & Recover, Navigation and Rescue. Every instructor should be pushing every student to take these classes as soon as possible. OW is not the end, it is just the beginning.

So why aren't instructors PUSHING these advanced classes? Simple! The LDS makes their money right after OW. The recently certified OW diver buys their initial gear and the LDS has no further interest in them. They have made the big sale. Now it's on to the next crop of newbies. And if the LDS isn't interested, neither are the instructors.

I don't put the blame on PADI, I put it ALL on the LDSs. They wanted a short course they could complete quickly so they could peddle gear. PADI created the system to satisfy the training centers, not the customers. The customer doesn't know what they want. If courses were routinely 16 weeks, that is what it would be. Customers would just accept that the course was 16 weeks. But the LDSs don't want to be involved with their students for that long. It ruins 'throughput'. They want to churn through students and sell gear.

The responsibility for this mess doesn't reside with PADI, NAUI or any other agency. They try to develop a program to fit the requirements of THEIR customers, the dive centers, not the students. The responsibility sits squarely on the LDSs and the instructors.

Richard

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I actually wonder if that's the main motivation, Bob. It's probably part of the equation, but the way I see it, when it gets down to brass tacks everyone wants to be safe. The fact that they'll accept minimal training has to do with a peculiarity in human nature. Nearly everyone thinks they're better than average. Better looking than average, smarter than average, better than average dRivers .... etc etc.. you get the picture...

So why does this trait lead to people accepting minimal training? Simply because students aren't buying "training". They're buying "access". They want the card, not the process, so if they can get to that goal faster and cheaper somewhere else they'll do it and pressure on time and budget for training is huge. Why don't most people want to buy "training"? Because they're the same overconfident ones who think they're better than average dRivers and they'll be able to sort out the wrinkles as they go....

In other words, they don't want to buy training not because they want "fast and cheap" but for the simple reason that they don't think they *need* training.... but they know they *need* the card. The brilliance of PADI as a commercial company was that they recognised this and played into it.

R..

I completely agree ... good observations all around.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[DCBC]

In other words, they don't want to buy training not because they want "fast and cheap" but for the simple reason that they don't think they *need* training.... but they know they *need* the card. The brilliance of PADI as a commercial company was that they recognised this and played into it.

I don't think that's the case Diver0001. I'm not convinced that the general public knows enough about diving to conclude that they don't need training. Like skydiving, people think that they do (I certainly didn't jump from an aircraft without knowing how to put-on the harness and get out of the aircraft in a safe manner). It just seems logical that someone has to show them how...

I believe the public trust the people they go to for advise. The fact that they are steered onto this path or that one will largely influence their ultimate direction. If they see one course at $200 and another at $300 they naturally look for the best deal. Hey that's great, faster and cheaper than the other LDS. Unfortunately however, they are not always made aware of the differences.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I don't think that's the case Diver0001. I'm not convinced that the general public knows enough about diving to conclude that they don't need training. Like skydiving, people think that they do (I certainly didn't jump from an aircraft without knowing how to put-on the harness and get out of the aircraft in a safe manner). It just seems logical that someone has to show them how...

I believe the public trust the people they go to for advise. The fact that they are steered onto this path or that one will largely influence their ultimate direction. If they see one course at $200 and another at $300 they naturally look for the best deal. Hey that's great, faster and cheaper than the other LDS. Unfortunately however, they are not always made aware of the differences.

Back when I was a DM, I spent a lot of time working in a dive shop that offered quality training ... and charged for it accordingly. Many's the occasion I would spend time on the phone or in person explaining to a prospective student why our OW class cost $289 while the one down the street was being offered for $129. I would explain the differences in class and pool time, the five dives vs four, the small class sizes and personalized instruction, and even the vouchers for discounts on purchases and rentals after class was completed.

Usually they were most concerned about the fact that not only did our class cost more, but it took three weeks as opposed to the one week that the competitor was offering.

And about 90% of the time they'd end up down the street choosing the $129 class.

I have to believe that they simply didn't see the added value ... or didn't believe it was important. In this case, I did everything possible to inform them and they still chose the faster, cheaper option.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[DCBC]

I don't put the blame on PADI, I put it ALL on the LDSs. They wanted a short course they could complete quickly so they could peddle gear. PADI created the system to satisfy the training centers, not the customers.

...The responsibility for this mess doesn't reside with PADI, NAUI or any other agency. They try to develop a program to fit the requirements of THEIR customers, the dive centers, not the students. The responsibility sits squarely on the LDSs and the instructors.

Richard,

I feel that all training organizations have a responsibility to insure that necessary standards are in-place to teach a student safely. Regardless of any responsibility that the LDS may have, I don't see how this could relieve a training agency (a separate legal entity) of its moral or legal responsibility to fulfill its charter. The training agency is the dog, not the tail.

 

[gcbryan]

...
No, their business plan was to try to offer the same services they have always offered. They didn't change their standards in response to the lower costs and service offered by Home Depot.

In terms of this discussion, it would be the same as an agency continuing to offer longer, more costly training to the average entry diver. You're proving my point for me, btw.

Again, thanks for making my point.

You confuse recognizing the reality of dominating forces in an imbalanced market devoid of necessary conditions for consumers to make fully informed choices (or often not even having choices based on locale) as "playing the victim."
...

So, any time a company comes in with lower prices (and services) you call it an imbalanced market?

I'd rather go to Home Depot and buy things cheaper than buy the same things (with less variety) at the local Mom and Pop.

There is no market principle that guarantees that any company once started can continue and can continue even in the face of change. Otherwise we would all be buying horseshoes. Some companies are more effective and efficient in dealing with change and those are the ones with the profits and the jobs to distribute.

So, since some Mom and Pops are doing well differentiating themselves there is no reason that some dive organizations can't do well by differentiating themselves.

People have to deal with change. I may not like it when sitting under a tree if an apple drops on my head but gravity being what it is...I still have to deal with it. Just because I used to be able to sit there without getting hit doesn't mean that now the laws of physics are imbalanced.