What constitutes professionalism?

[Herk_Man]

Being a professional means holding yourself to a significant set of standards.

Being professional means having a mastery of your subject material. It means being on time and organized, and having thought through what you are going to do before you do it. It means maintaining a pleasant and disciplined demeanor even when you are frustrated or irritated, unless changing that demeanor is what you deem best to motivate or inspire the student. It means having the self-confidence to admit when you don't know something, and making the effort to find the answer for the student if it can be found. It means disciplining yourself to demonstrate the behaviors you want the students to learn (buddy checks, anybody?) and that also includes communicating to the students that your OWN education is never-ending. It means taking responsibility for anything that goes wrong, even if it wasn't through your own actions, because the class is ostensibly under your control. It means soliciting feedback from your students and then seriously considering that feedback and making appropriate changes as a result of it. It means making the effort to improve yourself in any area where you don't feel you are the best role model.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with how much you charge, or even if you charge.

But just to be clear (and not insinuating that you meant otherwise) there is nothing wrong with doing something professionally with the goal of making money from it. To be clear, the best "professional" instructors are those that take pride in their work and don't base the quality of their instruction on the amount being paid, but it's still very ok to do something you enjoy in order to make a living or improve your life.

But as my Dad always said, "The key to happiness is not money, love, or things. It's doing the things you love and getting money for it."

 

[dumpsterDiver]

I didn't read all the comments, but in sports, a professional is someone who gets PAID to engage in the activity. An amateur is someone who does not. Many amateur athlets are allowed to retain amateur status and still receive reimbursement for expenses, food, equipment and sometimes even more than $100,000 (say for school). So if a scuba instructor is involved in a sport and he is reimbursed only for his costs (i.e. not really getting paid), is s/he an amateur (hobbyist?) or a "true" professional?

 

[Diver0001]

It is important to understand that a PADI instructor and the PADI organization are two completely separate things. If the organization takes a certain approach and someone takes them to task, they are not taking you personally to task, but the PADI organization. Perhaps some instructors identify themselves too much with the organization they teach through and have difficulty separating the two.

PM sent

 

[HenrikBP]

Had I not encountered Bob when I did, I would have been one of those instructors.

I think it's a question of exposure and desire to improve.

Example:
I learned to ride motorcycles a *long* time ago, and for the first 20 years I rode around and thought I was doing ok - partly because of the riding I was doing and the people I rode with. Then a friend talked me into doing a training weekend on a race track. Not racing, just practicing and improving skills in a safer environment.

After the first day I was ready to sell my bike ... nothing clicked. Essentially, for 20 years I'd just been repeating Year #1. Then the second day things started to fall into place. Braking, turning, accelerating were all getting smoother. In the afternoon I'm "flying" down the front straight, starting to bend into turn #1 "as fast as humanly possible" when one of the instructors come flying by me as if I'm standing still, turns in the saddle mid-turn with a knee scraping on the ground, lets go of the bars with one hand to give me a huge thumbs-up. Truly humbled I realized there were still lots to learn.

Similar with diving and/or teaching, if you don't seek out challenges, and expose yourself to different viewpoints and ways to do things it's very easy to get stuck just repeating Year #1. And no matter where you are in skill level, there is always something to learn.

Henrik

 

[Walter]

I didn't read all the comments, but in sports, a professional is someone who gets PAID to engage in the activity. An amateur is someone who does not. Many amateur athlets are allowed to retain amateur status and still receive reimbursement for expenses, food, equipment and sometimes even more than $100,000 (say for school). So if a scuba instructor is involved in a sport and he is reimbursed only for his costs (i.e. not really getting paid), is s/he an amateur (hobbyist?) or a "true" professional?

I would suggest reading the comments. I believe your questions will be answered.

 

[Herk_Man]

There is a difference between a "Professional" and someone who does things with "Professionalism." You can do the latter and not make a dime. You can be the former and lack the latter completely. If you are the former and have the latter, you have found the key to success and happiness.

Now where did I put my ladder.

 

[Diver0001]

What do you do, or how do you classify the instructor who took all the classes he could, went through his IDC with motivation and effort, and teaches precisely as he was taught?

In polite company I would call them "closed for learning"

To my best friends I would call them "idiots"

Is there a point to this?

I know an instructor who did his IE in the Canary Islands with limited real-world diving experience but a fair amount of life-experience in something like 3 weeks. When he first came back I thought he had had a lobotomy. He was *that* bad.... an embarrassing PADI poster-boy with all talk and no skill. 3 weeks before I was showing him how to become an adequate DM and 3 weeks later I "assisted" him (I was still a DM) with his first course as instructor and had to prop him up.

But that was 5 or 6 years ago. These days I'm an instructor too and he's become a colleague that I can rely on. He learned.

If someone had seen him right after his certification they would have concluded that instructors were idiots. The man I work with today is nothing like that.

And that's precisely the problem with defining "professionalism". People want to see it as some kind of universal truth but it's not. It's a snap shot in time.

At my day job I've had moments of brilliance (not to play my own drum) that impressed even me. And I've had moments of stupidity that must have left people wondering how I even got my degree. Same thing applies to scuba training. There have been moments that I wish I could forget... on the whole, however, they're not that common. For the students who were there to witness the brain-farts, however, it must have confirmed the internet image of instructors as being complete idiots.... the ones we all love to complain about 98.7% of the time.

R..

 

[Kingpatzer]

I didn't read all the comments, but in sports, a professional is someone who gets PAID to engage in the activity. An amateur is someone who does not. Many amateur athlets are allowed to retain amateur status and still receive reimbursement for expenses, food, equipment and sometimes even more than $100,000 (say for school). So if a scuba instructor is involved in a sport and he is reimbursed only for his costs (i.e. not really getting paid), is s/he an amateur (hobbyist?) or a "true" professional?

There is a difference between how the term is being used. "Professional" can refer to compensation. In which one can say that a person is a professional gardener compared to an amateur gardener. But it is not being used that way here.

It is being used to convey the connotation similar to the way it is used of a physician or a lawyer. Even if they provide their services for free as acts of charity, they are still practicing a vocation or avocation requiring training and dedication.

There's also a sense of a professional being someone who has a certain degree of mastery and is able to take on apprentices or provide mentorship.

 

[TSandM]

Rob, I didn't word my post well. I didn't mean the person who comes home from the IDC and thinks any deviation from the precise procedure he was taught is heinous (Peter is dealing with that now). I'm talking about somebody who paid attention and is earnestly trying to do the best job he can with what he knows -- but he doesn't know how much he is lacking, simply because he has never encountered anyone or anything that expanded his diving horizons. He is what a lot of us would consider a poor diver, simply because he doesn't know he's a poor diver, because everybody around him dives the same way he does. He might not be resistant to change, but nobody's trying to get him to change.

He may be very professional, but not very competent -- not through carelessness or lack of responsibility, but through ignorance. And if you get through an IDC ignorant, whose fault is that?

 

[Peter Guy]

I'll confess I'm in the camp that splits "professional" from "competent." My first wife and I periodically went around and around on this topic because I'd tell her she was NOT a "professional journalist" since journalism was NOT a profession -- whereas I was a professional since I was a practicing attorney and the law was a profession.

Now she may well have been a more competent journalist than I was an attorney but she was NOT a professional in my view.

Simply put, unless there is some generally agreed upon set of standards by which a person must act, there can be no "profession." Thus "businessmen" can not be "professionals" because there is no generally agreed upon set of standards -- even though they may be highly competent, ethical, moral or whatever -- but NOT professional.

I think that is a problem with Scuba Instruction -- especially with the OP of this thread. I know HIS standards and how they apply to him but his standards (as well as many who have responded here) may well NOT be "generally accepted" as the standards for teaching Scuba. In fact I really doubt there ARE "generally accepted standards" for the teaching of Scuba (the RSTC or whatever the heck the name is) to the contrary.

I know that people use "professional" interchangeably with "competent" (I love the ads that say "Our people are trained professionals" as if I, or anyone else, wants untrained professionals!) but they are two different concepts IMHO.

I don't believe there are "professional scuba instructors" because of a lack of real standards. I know there are competent ones however.