Dive Professional Career
Essential Scuba Diving Instructor Skills (Underwater Skills)
Additional scuba diving, tech diving, freediving, and snorkeling skills a professional dive instructor should master for a successful career.
Darcy Kieran is the author of the handbook “Your Career and/or Life as a Scuba Diving Instructor: How to Make a Good Living Out of Your Passion for Scuba Diving” and a unique advanced logbook & checklists for scuba divers, divemasters & instructors.
I thought my scuba diving skills were pretty good until I taught with Jim Brandt and Richard Hartley in Fort Lauderdale. I got a massive wake-up call! The way they were doing their skills knocked me off my fins. I realized I had not learned everything during my dive instructor course.
As a diver, you need to be able to remove and replace your mask while underwater. You can do it in many different ways, and it’s okay. As a diver! But as an instructor, you should be held to a higher standard, and the main reason is that student-divers must be able to see and understand a logical and practical series of steps when looking at your demonstration. Your hands and body must be positioned so that the students see you. And it has to look cool! If it seems like you are about to panic, that won’t work very well.
For an instructor, there are ways to do skills that are better than others. While I was teaching with Richard and Jim, I took notes and wrote down detailed steps every evening. I reviewed them the next day with Jim. We ended up improving on the best steps to use when demonstrating scuba diving skills.
We called these steps “critical attributes” for some fancy reason.
I saw improvement in my students once I started using these “better steps.”
Unfortunately, not every instructor trainer has to ability to help you with that. I’ve seen instructor trainers (course directors) who could barely control their buoyancy!
It’s on you to improve your scuba diving skills. It’s your career!
Many divers take all their scuba courses from the same instructor or dive center. It means that they may have learned something wrong and kept on doing it repeatedly. As a dive center owner, I wanted my client-divers to do everything with my dive center. But as a mentor to future dive instructors, I suggest you take courses from different instructors. It’s the best way to seeing the same thing done in different ways and determining the best one for you.
By the way, Richard is now deceased. May he rest in peace! And Jim is in Guam. Say hello to him for me!
Beyond mastering the basic scuba diving skills, a dive instructor should have many more cards in his back pocket.
We will look at additional underwater skills of value to a recreational scuba diving instructor, under four categories:
- recreational diving
- tech diving
- freediving
- snorkeling
Additional Recreational Scuba Diving Skills for Dive Instructors
One way of pushing your recreational scuba diving skills is by taking dive specialty courses, if you do it with a qualified dive instructor (mentor).
There are many jokes about these dive specialties in the dive industry because some of them sound more like a racket to extract money from card collectors than anything else. But there are good dive specialty courses if you select a professional instructor for them. And doing more diving is always good for an instructor.
Don’t be shy to take a diver-level specialty course even if you are already a dive instructor. How else will you learn? By winging it?
Nitrox diving should be a requirement for all dive instructors. It is now widely used around the world. And as an instructor, since you are performing a lot of diving and doing bad stuff like yo-yo diving, you should always dive with nitrox. I was so convinced of it that, at one point, in my dive center, I asked all instructors to always dive with nitrox unless diving with trimix, of course! I provided free nitrox fills to them.
Besides, it was also a good marketing tactic. Divers will ask what it is and will want it. I believe all divers should dive nitrox all the time. Why not? It was not just a marketing tactic!
Deep diving is a must. In theory, the entry-level open water diver course limits a diver to a maximum of 60 feet (18 m), the second level of course to 100 feet (30 m), and the deep-diving specialty brings the diver to a max of 130 feet (40 m). As an instructor, you will go to 130 feet! But besides that, it comes with fun skills and a bit more knowledge.
Drift diving is also a wonderful tool to have. As an instructor, you are likely to end up in drift dives, especially if you go to places where drift diving is pretty much all they do, like in Cozumel.
Diving in current doesn’t necessarily mean drift diving. For instance, the dive boat may be moored to a wreck on the St. Lawrence River with a strong current. You want to go down and up that line without losing your mask. Better yet, find a mentor who can show you that even in strong current, if you are streamlined and properly positioned, you can do so without holding the line. You’re a dive instructor. Your skills should be better than those of a tourist.
Wreck diving. Besides understanding dangers around wrecks and proper dive behavior, you should have some sort of training in wreck penetration. One of your divers, one day, for sure, will get inside a wreck even if you told them 1000 times, in your briefing, not to.
Navigation is a given. If your instructor is good, you will be challenged, making you a much better diver and instructor. Push hard on that front. You will dive in a wide variety of dive sites and sea conditions in your career as a scuba diving instructor. Navigation techniques may vary.
Night diving. There’s a lot of sea life you will only encounter at night. Many recreational divers fear diving in the dark. You should be sufficiently comfortable at night that they feel it. Some training agencies mix night & low-visibility diving. It has similarities. I became fully comfortable at night after dive exercises Richard Hartley had us do at night with no light whatsoever. Your dive instructor skills should be at least a few notches above that of a recreational diver.
Buoyancy is another obvious one. You better be a guru, master, or god at controlling your buoyancy! Hovering is a skill many dive instructors struggle with at the beginning of an instructor course. Swimming in a streamlined, horizontal position is another one. I have even seen instructor trainers struggling with it at the beginning of the course director training program. It’s ridiculous!
Controlling your buoyancy underwater is the equivalent of walking on land. If you do not have a perfect mastery of your buoyancy, you are simply not serious about your dive professional career.
Complete guide to success: Your Career and/or Life as a Scuba Diving Instructor: How to make a good living out of your passion for scuba diving.Tech Diving Skills For Recreational Scuba Diving Instructors
Even if you have no intention of ever teaching tech diving, you will benefit from skills and techniques learned in tech diving courses.
There are many skills and a lot of knowledge that tech divers learn that recreational scuba diving instructors would find valuable, like how to calculate breathing rate and air consumption, different ways of setting up and streamlining dive gear, and alternative ways of finning to reduce environmental disturbance.
Furthermore, as a recreational dive instructor, you may end up exceeding the no-decompression limit (NDL). In Fort Lauderdale, I helped teach instructor specialty courses at Tenneco towers, which are old oil rig platforms. You get to a depth of 75 feet at the top of the structure and 110 feet to the sand. We were practicing wreck and deep diving with instructor candidates. As instructed by the instructor trainer, my role was to stay at the tower to practice penetration with three teams, one after the other. A divemaster was bringing the instructor candidates to me. I ended up exceeding the NDL.
Your recreational training agency will tell you to never do it, but that is them putting their head in the sand. It will happen to you, for sure, at one point.
When recreational scuba divers end up in decompression, nowadays, they don’t have a second thought about it. They do whatever their dive computer tells them to do. Or not. But as a dive instructor, you should understand the theory of decompression diving and the best ways to deal with required decompression stops.
You would particularly benefit from two entry-level tech diving courses: decompression procedures & advanced nitrox, which is diving with gas mixes containing more than 40% oxygen. In the case of a recreational dive instructor, it can be valuable for the safety or decompression stops.
There are also advanced wreck penetration courses in the tech diving curriculum. If you dive where there are many wrecks, like along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence seaway, you will benefit from that.
But remember that being a tech diver doesn’t make you a tech diving instructor. Please resist the urge to show how great you think you are to your recreational scuba diving clients. It would be bad for all parties involved!
Freediving Skills For Scuba Diving Instructors
Freediving is a more touchy topic. I have noticed over the years that most scuba diving instructors have barely any freediving skills. It is not their fault. They may have been introduced to a snorkeling duck dive in their entry-level open water diver course, and that was the beginning and end of it.
Yet, there is a lot of stuff a dive instructor can do with freediving skills. I am not talking about competitive freediving, just going deeper and/or longer than a snorkeling tourist.
For instance, you may want to quickly check on divers who have been at the 15-feet safety stop for a long time, or going to get your sunglasses that you dropped overboard. In many cases, you can do the mooring with freediving, with no need for scuba gear. And if nothing else, it will make you look cool!
There is at least one undeniable benefit to formal freediving training: breathing. A proper freediving course comes with breathing techniques. I am not talking about learning to hold your breath for 10 minutes. We never do that in scuba! But just breathing.
When I was still a recently certified open-water diver, I had the chance, one day, to be in the pool with a freediving instructor. He had me hold my breath underwater while floating on the surface. I did it for a certain amount of time. Then, he gave me a few exercises and pointers before asking me to try again. And I did it for much longer, right there, right then.
It’s really about being calm and needing less air. Your scuba cylinder will last longer, and that is pretty important for an instructor.
When I was still working on my divemaster course, I went to Cuba to dive in the Bay of Pigs. My goal was to dive, dive, dive. I needed and wanted more dives into my logbook. The problem I had all week was that most of our dives barely lasted 30 minutes. Our dive guide was always the first to be low on air, and they didn’t want us to dive without a guide. Think about it! As a dive instructor or divemaster, you should be the one who always has more air left than anybody else.
Snorkeling Skills For Professional Dive Instructors
I bet you are finding it funny that I created a section for snorkeling skills, but… Let’s think about it for a second. In many dive destinations, you will work on “dive boats” offering snorkeling tours besides scuba diving outings.
Dive instructors tend to be snobbish when it comes to snorkeling. It is said that snorkeling is like kissing through a screen door. But not everybody will take scuba diving. And snorkeling is a much larger market. In the USA, there are about 7.7 million active snorkelers, for only about 2.5 million active scuba divers. If you work in a dive shop, you will sell plenty of fins, masks, and snorkels to snorkelers.
How about embracing snorkeling and finding ways to provide an awesome experience for these people? They certainly won’t make the jump to scuba if we treat them like dirt when they visit us for snorkeling. What I regularly see on dive boats carrying a load of snorkelers looks more like cattle-carrying than an extraordinary vacation experience.
There are skills that make snorkeling a much better experience, and they are related to properly using the equipment. We should take the time to explain to wannabe-snorkelers how to best use their fins (dog pedaling will get them nowhere), how to position their snorkel (so that the tip is not underwater), and how to adjust their mask (without tightening the strap so much that they are giving themselves a headache).
I suggest you start by ensuring you are comfortable snorkeling. When is the last time you did it? Ever?
Tankless Diving Skills For Scuba Diving Instructors
Surface-supplied air systems for tankless diving have been around for quite some time. We sold hundreds of them in a chain of dive stores I was managing in South Florida. Yet, they are pretty much “below the radar” in the dive industry. And they shouldn’t be, since they come with many advantages.
And it’s a growing segment of the dive industry! While the sale of scuba gear dipped about 20% during the COVID-19 pandemic, sales of Brownie’s Marine Group (a Florida-based manufacturer of tankless diving systems) grew by over 50%. We should take notice!
I have already discussed tankless diving in detail in a prior post.
For now, I simply suggest you have a look at it and try it for yourself. You are likely to encounter such a system in a resort somewhere. For many people, it can be seen as a step between snorkeling and scuba diving. We already discussed how snorkeling is part of many dive professionals’ careers. Therefore, the same applies to tankless diving.
While using a BLU3 tankless diving system off the beach in South Florida, I noticed an additional benefit for instructor candidates: buoyancy mastery. With such a system, you dive without a BCD. Therefore, you have to actually wear the right amount of weight for you because you cannot overcompensate by adding air to your BCD.
If I ever teach a scuba diving instructor course again, I will have them all show me their mastery of buoyancy with a tankless diving system!
You may be interested in further readings about a professional career as a scuba diving instructor:
What other skill have you found to be valuable to you in your career as a dive instructor? Please use the comment section below.
Also from Darcy Kieran:
- Handbook: Your Career and/or Life as a Scuba Diving Instructor: How to Make a Good Living Out of Your Passion for Scuba Diving.
- Logbook: Advanced Scuba Diving Logbook with Checklists for certified scuba divers, divemasters & dive instructors.
- Handbook: Advanced Guide to SPF Scuba Diving for Scuba Divers, Divemasters & Dive Instructors: Develop Better Scuba Diving Skills, Dive Safer, Save Money & Have More Fun!
- Handbook: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Scuba Diving: How to Increase Safety, Save Money & Have More Fun!
- Logbook: STARTER Scuba Diving Logbook with Checklists while getting your open water diver certification!
- Reference book: Scuba Diving Industry Market Reports, Data & Statistics.
Side note: During your surface intervals, have a look at my novels with a scuba diving twist, starting with “Mystery of The Blue Dragon” and “Shadows on Ocean Drive.”
You could help the dive industry by taking part in ongoing dive industry surveys. You will also find results from our past scuba diving market studies here.
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What now? Have a look at the complete Scubanomics Table of Contents.
