Essential Non-Diving Skills for Scuba Diving Instructors

Out-of-water skills. That’s where dive instructors often fail in their attempt at “living the dream.”

Instructors are a dime a dozen. Pumping out dive instructors is a very profitable production mill for dive centers. You pay them to become a dive instructor; then, you work for close-to-nothing to accumulate certs to go up in the pyramid. It smells almost like a Ponzi scheme!

If you want to step outside the fast-food-like production chain that leads to dive instructors quickly dropping out of the dive industry, you must differentiate yourself by bringing a high dose of professionalism. And another way is by adding cards to your poker hand.

Let’s look at your credentials as a series of playing cards. Let’s say you are playing poker, and you have nine cards while other players around the table have two. You can be sure they do not have a royal flush! And your chances of getting one are much better than if you only had five cards.

These “cards” are additional skills you have mastered.

On top of giving you a competitive advantage, these additional skills can also be life and time-saving. In fact, some of them should be required for all dive instructors, if you ask me.

This post is part of our Living The Scuba Dream series by the Business of Diving Institute and Darcy Kieran, author of:

Understanding Marine Life & Marine Life Injuries

A dive instructor… dives! With that much time underwater and, in many cases, under a tropical sun, understanding marine life is quite crucial — in more ways than one.

After pretty much every dive, some divers will come to you with a bunch of questions about this black fish, that beige branch on the coral head, and whatnot. They will be very disappointed if you don’t know. Not only will you lose tips, but you may also lose credibility and repeat clients. After all, for many of your clients, discovering and witnessing underwater life is the main reason for their interest in scuba diving. If you can’t help them with that, you are missing the boat.

And there’s another reason.

Even though you will teach divers to hover in mid-water and touch nothing, accidents happen. Understanding how to treat marine life injuries should be a requirement for all divemasters and instructors. You will feel pretty bad if such an injury happens under your watch and you do not know if you should apply hot water, cold ice, or just make a prayer!

First Aid & CPR

Dealing with injuries from marine life is a specialty. It requires you to master basic first-aid skills, to start with.

To become a dive instructor, one is usually required to be current in first aid and CPR skills. In some countries, dive instructors must maintain those credentials with frequent re-training, usually every two years. Even if you work in a country with no such regulation, you should do the same. You will sleep better! And you will look better in front of a judge if you end up there one day.

Since first aid & CPR is also a requirement you will ask of your rescue and divemaster students, it is a good idea to be a first aid instructor yourself. Some training agencies offer such programs, like PADI and TDI/SDI. If your training agency doesn’t have a first-aid instructor program, look around. There are many organizations with whom you can teach first aid and CPR.

Depending on where you teach, you may want to get specialized first aid training for remote locations when medical help is not readily and quickly available. It may be labeled Remote & Wilderness First Aid or other names like that. If you don’t need it because 911 will get an ambulance to you in a few seconds, it’s still a fun course to take. I became much more comfortable at teaching the introductory first aid course once I had pushed myself with advanced training.

Dive Gear, Cylinder Handling & Maintenance

We discussed being ready with first aid skills to take care of divers. The other thing you will spend a lot of time around is dive gear.

One day, you will be by the water with a group of divers, and a piece of dive gear will malfunction. My preferred way to deal with it is to not! I like to have a spare of everything so I can easily substitute. However, it helps tremendously to have a basic understanding of how regulators, BCDs, and valves function. It is valuable to know the difference between a cosmetic issue and a life-threatening one.

Otherwise, dive centers regularly look for service technicians. It is not as glamorous as introducing people to the underwater world, but it can be an excellent source of additional income for you. And it will make you more valuable to a prospective employer.

The same applies to being a visual cylinder inspector. In my dive shops, cylinders were always my biggest fear. I can deal with people and dive skills, but I was never sure of the condition of the cylinders the clients were bringing to my dive store to be filled. It’s the legs of the fill station operator that get cut off when a cylinder explodes.

In your case, sometimes it will be the cylinders of the dive center where you work you should worry about. Many dive centers in tropical destinations are pretty lax with the inspection and maintenance of their fleet of cylinders, although these cylinders are used intensively and daily in saltwater conditions.

Even if you never work as a visual cylinder inspector, being trained as such will give you expertise and confidence in customary external inspection for early detection of potential problems. Professional Scuba Inspectors (PSI) is a training agency specializing in cylinder inspection. They usually offer visual inspector training just before or after the annual DEMA Show, which is the American dive industry trade show.

Training on compressor maintenance is another great card to carry in your deck, especially in areas where one cannot readily call in a representative of the compressor company.

Boating Skills

A dive instructor needs to be extremely familiar and comfortable with boat operations because a boat is the equivalent of your office! Most diving in the world is done off a boat in tropical destinations. There is a limited number of crew members on board. Therefore, the more skills you have, the better it is. It makes you worth more than “one.”

Start by having at least some basic navigation knowledge and practice. If you are in the US, I suggest the US Power Squadrons.

The Power Squadrons (USPS), also known as America’s Boating Club, is a non-profit educational organization with a mission to improve maritime safety and pleasure through classes in seamanship, navigation, and other related subjects. I got training with the Canadian Power & Sail Squadrons (CPSS) and learned a lot on top of having fun.

Otherwise, one of the surest ways of getting a job in the dive industry as an instructor is to add an official captain license to your list of credentials. In many places, having an officially certified captain in charge of the boat is a requirement — like in the Florida Keys. And there are many liveaboards in need of captains. Even if they do not need a new captain when they are discussing employment with you, it would be valuable for them to have a dive instructor able to step into the captain’s shoes if needed.

Swimming Skills

This can be a touchy subject. Many divers and dive instructors are not athletic and may not be able to teach swimming. Your swimming skills should still be more than average.

Furthermore, if you have the ability to become a swim coach or swim instructor, this would be a wild card in your hands. It would be beneficial for many dive centers. It seems so logical, yet so rare to see.

Some dive centers are mainly a swim business with scuba on the side. Swimming is a profitable and much bigger market than scuba. Yet, most dive centers do not even think about it. They barely check if people can swim before registering them for scuba lessons.

Language Skills

For the most part, scuba diving businesses depend on tourism. Having the ability to serve clients in more than one language is a major trump card. In fact, you will often see it listed as a requirement in dive industry job postings.

A lot of diving happens in tropical countries where Spanish is the official language. So, Spanish is a good one to have. But what matters most is our ability to serve tourists coming in. In some parts of the world, most dive tourists are Chinese. In other regions, they are German. And so on and so forth.

The more languages you speak, the better.

Management, Marketing & Sales

People get into the dive industry because of their passion for scuba diving, but somebody must still take care of the back-end office.

You ain’t gonna teach much if you ain’t got clients!

And since dive operators are usually small businesses, administrative tasks rarely justify a full-time position. If you can do that on top of teaching scuba, it will make you more valuable to the dive operator.

Furthermore, this serves as an insurance policy for you on days you can’t dive for health reasons. You can still work on these days, doing administrative stuff.

At the very least, dive instructors need to be comfortable with social media. Scuba diving is a very visual activity, perfect for social media. Anybody can post on Instafake and Facebug, but there are best practices that will provide better results. Notably, social media is meant to be… social. Posting is just the beginning of a conversation.

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