Vandit Kalia, 1 March 2025
One thing I have realised in speaking to divers of all experience levels – from beginners to instructors – is that most of them have a very incorrect perception of what the dive industry is all about.
I see newer divers have a blind faith in the content they are taught, assuming it to be designed towards making them good divers. I see experienced divers complaining about training standards and how they seem to be slipping. And I see instructors also working on the assumption that the training standards for a particular course are all that there is to follow. And I see people across all spectrums of the diving world blaming agencies for any accidents or incidents that happen, or for a failure to enforce standards or whatever.
All of them are wrong.
Let’s put this in context. Dive agencies are for-profit, privately-owned businesses that are selling a product for profit. And what is that product? It isn’t training standards – it is liability protection for dive centres and dive professionals.
How does it work? If you walk into a dive center and say you want to dive, but have no idea on what diving is all about, the liability for any injury that may happen falls upon the dive center or pro conducting the program: they have to prove that they were not negligent . After all, you, as a newcomer to the sport, have no idea what the risks are and cannot meaningfully accept the responsibility for their own safety. On the other hand, if you walk into a dive center as a full trained, certified diver who knows the risks of diving as well as the techniques to manage that risk, you can claim to be responsible for your own safety. In other words, the liability for anything that goes wrong shifts to you (of course, subject to no malfeasance on the part of the dive center/professional, etc etc).
What dive agencies do is provide a means for transferring this responsibility for their safety on to the diver. They do so by defining standards as to what constitutes adequate training to become a certified diver, who knows the techniques involved in diving safely. They say “if you learn X, Y and Z, you know how to dive safely, you know the risks and you how to handle those risks”. So now, you have a diver who is trained in the sport – in other words, they are now capable of accepting the responsibility of their own safety.
Now if there is a dive accident and again, assuming no malfeasance on the part of the dive center or professional, they can say “hey, the diver is trained in the sport and has the skills and knowledge to be responsible for their own safety, as per industry standards prevalent across the world. It is not our fault – if you have a problem with this, take it up with the people who set the standards for how much training is needed for this.”
And that’s where it gets hard. Because the standards arent just set by PADI or SSI or NAUI – it is set by all of them combined, the umbrella body known as the World Recreational Scuba Training Council. So now who has the expertise to stand up and say that ALL the experts employed by all these agencies are wrong? No one. Risk mitigated.
So let me repeat: training standards exist solely for the purpose of providing the divers with enough skills and knowledge to take on the responsibility for their own safety.
Now of course, being able to dive safely is a key part of this – even the WRSTC would be hard placed to defend their standards if people get injured a lot. So it isn’t that these standards are poor or unsafe or anything like it – quite the contrary. Despite what some people moan about online, diving is a very safe sport and has continued to be so for a long time, mainly because of the near-universal acceptance of these standards.
What these standards are not designed, however, is to necessarily create GOOD divers – they are designed to provide a minimum level of competence needed to be safe. And while the Venn diagram for these two overlap quite a bit, they do not coincide to one hundred percent.
The reason for this is that dive agencies are not gatekeepers to the sport: a privately-owned company somewhere in the US or Australia or Germany doesn’t really have any basis for setting a competence-related bar to who can participate in the sport. They can define what is needed to be safe, they can impart that knowledge to the diver – but after that, it is up to each diver to do what they need to do. That’s actually an explicitly-stated part of the bargain, along the lines of: “now that you know what the risks are and what the required skills are, it is up to you to make sure you are capable“.
So any failure to maintain that level of competence is a fault of the diver – and in principle, I absolutely agree with this. Yes, dive professionals exist to watch over us, but that is a safety net – as certified divers, we all need to be personally responsible for our own safety. That’s why we do training courses – so we know what our limits are and when to ask for additional support/supervision.
So does this mean that the dive industry doesn’t care about creating good divers? Actually, no – even though the system is designed for safety, there is a group of people who do care about competence. Those people are called dive instructors – well, the good ones, anyway. Good dive instructors realise that just checking off a bunch of skills from the standard manual isn’t enough to create good divers: they go above and beyond the minimum, and try to make sure divers really are comfortable with the skills (atleast to the point that they can continue to get better on their own), and also have the right mental attitude when it comes to how they approach the sport.
But everyone starts at a different level of comfort. And after the course is over, some people may go a long time without diving – so it is difficult for someone else to ensure that the skills stay fresh. That’s why you, the diver, need to step up and take ownership of getting better: it’s your job, not the agency’s.