In the PADI IDC you’ll learn to give a proper demonstration, assess students’ performance against the standards, and give feedback. But there’s something a lot of IDCs forget to teach, and it can be the difference between training safe divers and selling certifications. This blog post is about the human factors in scuba instruction.
Beginners and experts
In other adventure sports, the difference between experts and unskilled participants is immediately clear. If you’re bad at surfing, you’ll fall off your board. If you’re bad at skiing, you won’t get far either. And if you’re bad at paragliding, well… that speaks for itself.
Diving doesn’t work like that. A bad diver may go through their air quicker, and their buoyancy is all over the place. But that’s about it. They’re still seeing the same turtle. Still swimming over the same beautiful reef as the expert diver next to them. In a way, that’s one of the great things about scuba diving. You don’t have to be an expert to enjoy it.
The hidden risks
The risks in scuba diving are also less obvious than in other sports. You’ll have to learn how to ski, or you risk breaking a leg. In a diving course, students learn about DCS, lung overexpansion injuries, and gas narcosis. All things that may not be immediately apparent, or even abstract to entry-level students. Most of this is covered in the theory part of the course, nowadays often done as “self-study” online.
A dive site rated a “difficult dive” often doesn’t look much different from other dive sites when seen from the surface. A surfer can look at a three-metre swell from the beach before deciding whether to paddle out. A skier can stand at the top of a black run and see exactly what they’re about to commit to. A diver can’t do this. You can’t look at a wreck at 30 metres from the boat and judge the current or the exit point. You find out once you’re in it.
What divers actually need
In surfing or skiing, the sport gives you feedback automatically: you fall off the board, you’ll eat snow. Diving doesn’t do this. A diver can forget their buddy check, have bad buoyancy control, ignore their dive computer, be generally unsafe, and still have a nice dive.
This is why self-assessment matters in diving. If the diver doesn’t check in with themselves, nothing else will. Until it is too late and something goes horribly wrong. Self-assessment replaces the feedback other sports give for free.
This is where something called ‘the Dunning-Kruger effect’ comes in. It’s the tendency for beginners to overestimate their own competence, because they don’t know enough to see what they’re missing. In sports with instant feedback like skiing or surfing, this gap gets corrected fast. In diving, without something forcing the correction, it can persist for years.
What it takes from the instructor
Teaching a skill is straightforward: demonstrate it, watch the student copy it, correct errors, check it off. Self-assessment and proper judgement can not be taught that way. You can’t demonstrate to someone how to judge their own limits.
Self-assessment is a skill that has to be built deliberately, through repetition and feedback. It doesn’t develop on its own after a few dozen dives.
Start by giving students a reason to check in with themselves, not just complete a task. This starts before the dive: ask what they expect from it, and what problems they think might come up. After the dive, ask more than “did you get it right?” Ask how it felt, what their breathing was doing, where their attention was. This trains the habit. A diver who’s never been asked how a dive felt has no practice noticing when something’s off.
An instructor can model this directly by stating their own limits out loud: “That current was stronger than I expected.” Students learn that admitting uncertainty is normal only if they see it from someone whose competence isn’t in question.
As a student progresses through the Advanced course, the Rescue course, and the Divemaster course, this skill becomes more important, but there’s also more opportunity to teach self-assessment and proper judgement. A course I find particularly interesting to teach is the Self-Reliant Diver course, where self-assessment and judging dive conditions becomes an integral part of each dive.
The PADI IDC, and what we do differently
In the PADI IDC you’ll learn how to teach skills according to the standards. Every course director can deliver that. Maybe they’ll even give you an “exam pass guarantee.” But becoming a dive instructor is about much more than checking skills off a slate.
Choosing a PADI IDC is hard to get right, because you only do it once. You can’t compare two side by side. Many say “we teach more than just passing the exam,” but it costs nothing to say that. What’s harder to fake is how that actually shows up in the course. Do you get feedback on your judgement, or only on following the standards? Ask a course director this before you commit: “Can you give me an example of how you teach judgement, not just skills?”
This article was written by Marcel Jansen, PADI Course Director and founder of Asia Scuba Instructors. Marcel has been in the diving industry for over 20 years, teaching across Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Maldives, and Malaysia.
He runs PADI Instructor Development Courses across Asia and has strong views about how this industry trains its people.
Interested in becoming a dive professional? Find out more at asiascubainstructors.com.
