There is no ‘correct’ place for you to become an Instructor, perhaps this conversation will help you decide:
[Dive Students] I plan to dedicate the coming year to take the idc course along with my girlfriend so that we can both work as dive instructors later on. Firstly we’d like to thank you for all the great material you put on your website, it has already helped us a lot. If you have some additional time we would like to ask you a few more questions about the different diving centres and Dive Instructors referenced on your guide.
To give you a bit of context I’m currently an open water diver. I’ve experienced diving in the Philippines, in Thailand and in Aruba where I passed the open water certification. My girlfriend is a level 1 diver (which seems to be the equivalent of the open water certification in the French system), she has experienced diving in the French Overseas Territories, Australia, Egypt and Fiji Islands.
I’ve been a web developer for three years and my Girlfriend has been an intensive care registered nurse for eight years and we’re now looking for a lifestyle and career change. We’ve both been very keen on gaining an indepth knowledge of our respective professional areas. We would know like to put our learning appetite at the service of our common passion for diving both in theory and in practice.
We ‘re convinced that working and learning on the field and being supervised by competent mentors would be the best way for us to gain expertise in the diving area. The is why we’re currently looking for a mid/long term full time program which could bring us from our beginner level to a skilled and experienced dive instructor level. We dont really care of where we end up geographically, our main concern being the quality of the training. We’re thinking of finding a dive center where we could stay and learn as long as it takes to start our dive instructor career under the best possible conditions.
Given our profiles do you think that one of the instructor/program referenced on your website would be a particular good fit for us ? We’d greatly appreciate your input on that. Also we’re thinking of splitting our training into different period at different centres but we’ve read against this idea on the internet. What is your thought on that ?
Thanks again for the time you took to put all the idc guide resources online.
[IDC Guide]
Thanks for your kind words about IDC Guide and telling us about your plans, in summary here are my thoughts based on what you have told us:
1, A varied dive education in as many places as possible is really recommended, personally I done my PADI Courses in the UK, Egypt, Mexico and Thailand before working as an instructor / dive centre manager / owner in Thailand, each dive centre will try to offer you the full package (all courses through to Instructor) that could be cheaper / more convenient and quicker but at the end of it you will have less experience of places / instructors possibly, why not take a holiday in each location in your short list and do a course in each?
2, Location, even though you say location isnt important you need to think about the option of working after the course and clearly more popular dive locations will have a better potential to work there once you have qualified, as an Instruction looking for work and a dive centre owner I know that you have a lot of competition, as a new inexperienced Dive Instructor, and normally the dive centre will only give work to Instructors they know / trust or have experience of, additionally each location has different working / work permit requirements that you need to consider when deciding on a location to work.
3, As a web developer you will be more attractive to dive centre owners as they will always be open to updating / improving their own websites and that is how I got into website design actually (by improving / updating the dive centre’s website during quiet times), that is my full time job now and have built / promoted the IDC Guide and other dive centre websites due to the connections I made while working as an Instructor.
4, All the IDCs on the website are from experienced / recommended Dive Centres / Course Directors and I agree this training with the right mentor is key to gaining the right start, choose any of the ones listed for the most impressive / experienced PADI Dive Instructors in the World. Hope this helps
[Dive Students]
This is the email we are going to send:
We’ve read about your training program and its philosophy on idc-guide.com . It seemed really appealing to us and we’d like to know if there was any opportunity to be trained in your facility.
Do you have a kinda zero-to-pro program ? We could not find the informations on your website.
What do you think would be the best package for us and what would be included in it?
How much would it cost for both of us?
Do you have a job assistance program for newly graduated instructor?
What is the “pass ratio” of your program? Do all candidates have successfully passed the IDC?
Reply
Thanks a lot for your valuable insights. It has made us think again about the schedule we had in mind. In terms of locations we’re now focused on Central America, even if we have not completely abandoned the idea of also going to South East Asia. We’re currently getting in touch with Andy from Utila, Georgia from Costa Rica and Ash Mcknight from Cayman.
We’re also trying to figure out how we could split our training in different facilities with different instructors. As open water divers, our current plan is to go to Central America and start out with instructor Ash McKnight to reach the advanced diver level. Then we’d like to go to go from advanced to divemaster or rescue diver with Georgia King. After that we would like to get some professional experience as divemaster/rescue diver before continuing all the way to instructor with Andy Phillips. We ‘re still wondering if we could split our training even more by swinging by Europe at some point and learn some speciality courses with Steve from the UK.
We still have a long way to go but you’re inputs have probably put us on a better path to become truly competent instructors compared to what we had in mind in the first place so thanks again for that.