How was your scuba class?

So you took an open water (or other) scuba class and maybe it was amazing! The instructor was on point, you got pretty good control of your buoyancy, weighting, trim and propulsion. The instructor helped you understand how to be comfortable and safe in the water and you cannot wait for your next adventure! You feel prepared to go out on your own and dive safely. 

Or, maybe, you just finished your Open Water Diver Course with an instructor that did not seem like they knew what they were doing, was not able to help you overcome challenges in the water, had loaded you down with so much weight that you could barely get off the bottom and your experience felt rushed, confusing, or even unsafe. 

Either way I would encourage you to share your experience with whatever training organization you used! 

If you had a great instructor, sharing your experience allows the instructor to be recognized. If your experience was not so great, sharing your experience helps your instructor get the feedback they need to improve (or in extreme cases stop teaching) so that future students have a better experience. Your feedback is a critical part of improving the dive community for everyone.  Saying something helps keep us all safe as divers.

A bit of background may be helpful here. PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) is the biggest scuba certification agency in terms of market share by far. If you took an introductory Open Water Diver Course odds are it was with a PADI-certified instructor. PADI instructors are independent contractors: they operate on their own and are fully responsible for the quality of their teaching. PADI defines the standards that should be taught and provides teaching materials but the day-to-day instruction with students is essentially unsupervised in many cases. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does means that the quality and thoroughness of teaching can vary quite a bit  from instructor to instructor - just like you might find with home improvement contractors or other trades dominated by independent contractors. Once PADI instructors graduate from their certification program they are largely on their own to teach as they see fit according to the standards outlined by PADI. Some choose to teach to the bare minimum of what the standards require, others go above and beyond with flying colors, and a few may not even meet all of the standards when they teach classes.

Sharing your great (and not so great) experiences with PADI is easy. Just write an email with the details of your experience to their quality management department: qm@padi.com. PADI explains how they manage feedback on their Consumer Protection page. 

What if you didn't train with PADI? Here is the contact information for quality assurance for a couple other common dive training organizations. 

• SSI (Scuba Schools International) - SSI instructors, in contrast to PADI instructors, work for and are managed by the dive center/school they teach out of so you have two options for sharing feedback. Share it directly with the business that employed your instructor, or share it with the SSI parent organization at incident@divessi.com.

• NAUI (National Association of Underwater Instructors) - Contact NAUI's quality assurance program at ethics@naui.org.