Courses, Agency, Experience – What does it all mean??

I originally started this blog tackling a theory that many divers hold, that Advance Open Water and Rescue Diver are high level courses. While I will get into explaining my answer where I believe these are only basic skilled courses, I also found myself commenting and sharing my views on a couple of other comments I regularly hear and read; “Which agency is best?”, “It’s all about the instructor?” And “You need to gain experience first”.

Now this is not an Agency bashing post and I am going to stay away from commenting on specific Agency names. I will use some common course names, as the majority of divers will recognise the level I am referring to. I did just try writing this blog using terms Level 1,2,3 etc but it was difficult for me to even keep track of what I meant. So when I talk about ‘Open Water’ level, this is also known as Open Water 20, Ocean Diver, Scuba Diver, Club Diver etc.

Agencies:

Normally when people talk about dive qualifications, one agency is known above everyone else! Sometimes people can name a small handful. However many are shocked to understand there is over 150 different agencies (Some of these are linked as there are some parent Agencies, with offsets under them).

At the very top is the WRSTC (World Recreational Scuba Training Council) and many of the agencies work with this council. There is also CMAS (Confederation Modiale des Activites Suaquatiques) which was actually the first under water diving organisation setup in 1959, which does something slight different. Now the WRSTC mission is to set MINIMUM training standards an agency must meet to qualify a scuba diver. Many people believe they set the standards an agency must follow! This is incorrect an agency is able and it’s in own right to set higher standards than the minimum set out by the WRSTC.

A phrase I hear commonly is, Agency does not matter it’s all about the instructor. While this does have some underlying truth to it, it is very far from a truthful or informative statement. How I see it, agencies fall into certain categories. Below I have tried to split these out in a table below. This is not a definitive list as some agencies can fit into multiple categories, but more a way to show how agencies can have very different missions and goals.

Professional Recreational Agency	These are agencies that predominantly cater to professional recreational dive instructors. These courses are very much structured to offer courses that can be delivered in a set time window. These courses are normally broken down in to chunks, allowing customers to choose what they want to learn, but also assist the instructor in making a living from selling courses.
Club Based Recreational Agency	Club agencies are there to cater mainly for volunteers and groups of divers who want to get together and go dive as group. Courses are normally longer, contain more content with the idea of it being delivered on a continuous basis alongside normal club diving. Their specialities consist of courses to enable the club to go dive such as Chart Work and Boat Handling.
Professional Technical Agency	Same as Professional agencies above, but focus what they class as Technical Diving courses
Club Based Technical Agency	Same as club but focus what they class as Technical Diving courses
Professional Tec to Rec Agency	In recent years a couple of Technical Agencies have expanded in to the recreational course arena, and have added a slight twist by bringing some of the skills and disciplines of Tec diving into their recreational courses.

** What contributes as a TEC course can vary greatly between agencies. There are club based agencies out there that teach things such as decompression diving and twinset in their recreational program!

This table also does not mean all the agencies in a group are the same. If you take the Professional Recreational Agency group, there is a range between the agencies in the standards they set and the content of their course. So my advice is investigate the different agency options available to you, and work out which ones best suit your needs. Then aim to find a good instructor in that agency. Now you might find a great instructor who only teaches in your 2nd or 3rd choice of agency. This will then come down to a decision only you can make. If they are miles ahead, then go with the high quality instructor. Keep in mind, there is nothing stopping you switching agencies and instructors. It’s something I would suggest every diver does, as each Instructor, Agency and Course has it’s pro and cons. Take me for an example, I write these blogs and I try and share as much of this information in my teaching and diving as much as possible. There will be a time, where I have passed on the majority of it and the students learning curve will flatten off. If they want to continue getting extra knowledge above and beyond the course material then going with another instructor will open them up to a completely new set of ideas and views.

Agencies can also play a big part on how the instructor teaches with some having a lot of restrictions while others very few. Restrictions are not always a bad thing but they are not always a good thing. The level of support from Agencies also differs substantially. This can impact the normal courses as a consumer, but if you are looking to go Pro can have a big impact on your choice of agency.

So what makes a good instructor and how do you recognise one? That is going to be a fairly long blog for another time. Until I get round to writing, there are blogs written by others you might want to check out, as well as ask in the various social media forums.

Courses:

Now one of my pet peeves is course names, and I covered why in my blog You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know. While the course names have been a fabulous marketing strategy, it has breed a misunderstanding of the level of the course and who should take it. This has also been amplified by schools and agencies using this misunderstanding in sales pitches which has continued the cycle.

I see courses fitting into the following categories, again this might cause some debate, but it’s mainly to show how my thought process as formed.

My Category	My Take on My Category	How I think Courses fit into My Categories
Foundation	These courses lay a foundation of basic skills a diver needs to operate underwater. Many of the courses out there do not adequately equip a diver to conduct all but the simplest of dives. By this I mean going diving with an equivalently trained buddy independent of a school or club, basically going off by themselves.	Try Dives, Discovery Scuba, Scuba Diver, Open Water etc.
Core	Core skills are separated in many professional agencies across multiple courses. To me, all divers who want to go dive should have these key core skills and knowledge to dive safely and deal with the majority of issues that arise. I see these very much as core skills not advanced, and every diver should have them.	Advanced Open Water, Scuba Diver 2, Rescue Diver, Sports Diver, Navigation, Boat, Drift, First Aid, O2, Enriched Air, Master Scuba Diver
Professional	These skills focus around safely conducting and providing training. It’s about managing groups, courses, as well as a business. While these will improve a divers skills, unless you are actually going to progress into being an instructor, there are many more Advanced courses out their which will improve your diving.	Dive Master, Asst Instructor, Instructor
Advanced	These build on core skills and opens them up further and in greater complexity. While not required in recreational diving, it certainly can make a huge difference. The main focus for these courses is the more in depth planning, tighter controls & processes, and task load management. I have added ‘Deep’ as to me this requires advances skills to truly dive safely at this depth, however it is poorly taught in my view.  I also * rebreather has with costs coming down, I think in the future, more recreational rebreather courses will be available for brand new divers skipping out open circuit completely.	Deep 40, Deeper 40+, Twinset, Side mount, Decompression, Overhead, Rebreathers**,
Expedition	These types of courses, focus not just on the in water logistics of complex dives but also all the logistics on making those dives happen. It’s not about putting a few divers on a boat and going somewhere, it is about the researching a unknown location, gathering info on and planning routes. Conducting a project such as clearly mapping a cave system, or recovering large artefacts from ship wrecks. These are also conducted in the more challenging environments and locations. The skills learnt are very much around the very large picture.	Advanced Diver, First Class, Cave, Mine
Special Interest	Not everyone likes taking photos, not everyone is interested in fish. There is a number of these that divers in the community look down at, and this is normally for a couple of reasons. Instructors offer these to keep turning over courses and only cover the minimum standards. If there is something you are interested in, find an instructor who really has a passion for the subject and the course will be extremely worthwhile.	Marine Life, Photographer, Search & Recovery, Wreck, Dry Suit

There is not a direct link between course level and the quality of the diver. The same with number of dives, even two equally qualified divers with the same number of dives can be miles apart in terms of quality and knowledge. However on average the more courses someone has done and the more dives, does lead to divers being of greater quality. To put some perspective on that, let’s you have a scale of 1 to 100 on the quality of diver, the difference in the above could be 5 or 10 points, meaning there is a clear difference, but we are not talking either end of the scale. Again there are exceptions such as divers who have only done a couple of courses that are better than divers who have done loads. This is down to the level of tuition provided by the instructor and the divers only natural abilities.

The only way real way to improve is through structured learning; courses, workshops, perfect practice and research. Imperfect Practice, no practice, assuming cause and effect, all do not lead to great improvements. So the idea of just going diving is greatly going to improve you diving is a misconception, it will improve it very slowly compared to the efficiency as seeking knowledge and skills from an instructor or mentor. For example, a common question people ask is how to use less air and the majority of responses are based on an incorrect assumption of cause and effect on how we actually breath, rather than the actual correct answer that its in related to exertion. I did a specific blog on this subject How To Use Less Gas While Diving.

I am going to jump right in at the so called ‘Rescue Diver’ level as this has come up recently in the various forums. There seems to be this belief in the diving community that Rescue Diver is somehow an advanced course and you should really have more experience before you go do it. My first response to this, is Rescue Diver does not actually qualify you to do anything more in terms of recreational diving. The course is there to teach skills on how to mitigate risk, be more self-aware of  your diving and those around you, and how to safely rescue a buddy or diver if need be. To me this course content will greatly increase the safety of diver, and if they are able to pass the skills and knowledge tests, why would someone stop them from not taking it just because they only have 10 dives? I would rather dive with this person, than someone who has had no experience on any rescue skills. Now rescue diver does qualify you to assist and act as a rescue diver on courses, where having a decent amount of experience under your belt is ideal. However the choice of rescue diver comes down to the instructor, and many will only select a rescue diver they believe is capable of being one to a group of students. This is where experience will come into the decision. That’s not saying there is bad practice out there and there are instructors who will use an inexperienced rescue qualified diver to ensure a box is ticked.  I have a similar issue, of people suggesting getting more dives in before taking their Advanced Open Water, when there are clear skills that would immediately make them a much better and safer diver. My other challenge is if someone qualified 10 years ago as a Rescue Diver, not been involved in any rescues, not practice any, then compare them to someone who went through the course last week!

Carrying on the ‘Number of Dives’  stipulation, I believe this is an absolute must for Professional Courses. You need the experience to understand how everything in diving ties up and have the knowledge to answer the huge range of questions put to you from students. You also need to understand the conditions and site, so you can ensure the maximum safety of your students. I have seen a couple of instances of instructors taking newbies to a site they did not, and this shift the instructors attention away from the student and on to the site. A diver should have a decent amount of experience in number of dives and a variety. The knowledge is not what impacts them and their buddy as divers like core skills would give! This is about gaining experience on how things affect others, so they can easily identify trainees strengths and weaknesses and how to best support them.  I do have some concerns around ‘No of Dives’

1. It’s done on an honour system so anyone could fudge their dive statistics.
2. No of Dives does not equal scope, this means someone could do the same dive over and over to make up the numbers.
3. The required No of Dives is sometimes too low in my view.

I think professional levels should require a greater number of dives, and have some stipulation about diving in different environments (Boat, Shore, Drift, Night/Limited Visibility, Cold Water, 20m+ Range, 30m+ Range etc.).

Expedition courses should also have the same and from my knowledge they all do, as divers need to build up that knowledge and experience of real world situations. For Advance courses, I think it depends on the course, but most are broken down to different levels anyway.

Experience:

Now with everything I have said above, I am not dismissing experience. Experience can play a huge part in scuba diving, as long as divers learn from it. I see a couple of real issues in the dive community, close calls are laughed off and not really discussed and excuses are made. When people do share their incidents in wider groups, rather than a discussion taking place, what you find is finger pointing and grand standing. How are these divers, who are showing a willing to learn, going to learn when other divers just attack them, rather than working through the problem with structured solutions? Debriefs are just as important as briefings, as it gives the opportunity for everyone to reflect on the dive. By missing this out we could be normalising deviance, and embedding bad practice. Another blog plug Normalisation Of Deviance. To learn from a dive, it does not need to be a bad dive, even looking back at a good dive and really understanding why it went well can be just as enlightening than a bad dive. The key is to be open and supportive, as everyone can have a bad dive, and anything can go wrong. I have a recent example which happened the other day! There is a fairly advance dive I do maybe 10 times a year and I have dived it for a number of years. This year we have been blessed with some awesome visibility which has been amazing and made the dive less challenging. Over the course of a dozen dives, confidence grew and I started to forget how challenging the dive normally is. Then we dived it last week, the viz was poor, and it became a very challenging dive with a close call. Yes we did have a giggle about it after, but we also had a very serious in depth conversation about what happened, what we did that lead to the challenges we had and what we could have done differently. It also made us go back and review our planning. Our overall plan has not changed for the dive, but we have certainly added further detail to it and added some more what ifs solutions. This was stuff we hadn’t planned as previously they were totally unknowns (Just to point out, I am not aware of anyone else who does this dive, so it’s not like there is additional knowledge readily available). The experience gained and learnt will certainly now shape future dives at this site, but also can be used elsewhere.

As always I hope you enjoyed my ramblings, please check out my other blogs as I do try and vary the subjects.

G-SAV

Note: Thanks to Kosta Koeman for reviewing this for me, and giving me a couple additional points to add.

 

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know!

There are a lot of blogs out there around diving, skills, handy tips etc. There are not many that actually focus on the Psychology of Divers and Diving. I started directly commenting on this in my blog Normalisation of Deviance, but have lightly touched on it in many others so please do have a read of them. In this blog I wanted to concentrate a little on cognitive bias, and focus on two psychological phenomenon’s which are commonly known as ‘The Dunning-Kruger Effect‘ and  ‘The Johari Window‘. After going through my own learning curve, which I am still on, plus watching and listening to other divers, I think these clearly highlight some of the challenges we face within the diving community.

Dunning-Kruger Effect
In 1999, Kruger and Dunning did a study looking at the phenomenon of illusory superiority,  ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognising One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments’. I am sure now everyone reading this is nodding their heads, as some names/divers immediately jump to mind. I am not going to delve into their research, but simply comment on their graph below and how I see it relates to diving. If you are interested in this, there are plenty of articles and videos online, and I strongly recommended looking into them. They go a lot further into the psychology of the studies and findings.

As I mentioned in previous blogs, I have been through this personally! I think personally overall I am somewhere on the Slope of Enlightenment as there is loads I still need to learn and recognise its more complicated the more I go on. Before you ask, yes at one time I  was at the very peek of ‘Mount Stupid’ I had 100% confidence in my knowledge and ability. I look at back now and realise how little experience or wisdom I actually had. This very much takes me back to one of my favourite quotes I heard from another diver, “At 50 Dives I thought I knew Everything! At 250 I realised how wrong I was!“.

This phenomenon is very common and everyone goes through it in one shape or another with everything they learn. This is certainly not helped in the diving community by the course names many dive agencies use in recreational diving! The marketing has been excellent in this sense, as they promote superiority which artificially lifts that confidence.  ADVANCED Open Water, SPECIALIST subject, MASTER Scuba Diver, Dive MASTER, PRO Diver. What is interesting, is in what I have witnessed, is ‘Realisation’ has normally come when divers have either shifted from ‘Recreational to Tech Courses’, ‘Shifted Instructor/Agency’ or become an ‘Instructor With Organisational Responsibilities’. Just to clarify that last one about instructors, yes all have responsibilities, I am more talking about lead instructors, who have to do all the planning and organising, have their names on the line if something goes wrong, not the instructors who turn up, follow a plan, teach, then leave. This is also a generalisation as there are divers who fall outside of this who have shifted a long this curve as well as divers who progressed their training but are still camped out on Mount Stupid.

So how do divers move along and become better, more knowledgeable divers? In my blog Better Way To Dive, To Be A Better Dive I touched on some physical things you can do and questions you can ask yourself about your own diving.  Staying on the psychology side, I now want to introduce the second part “The Johari Window”.

Johari Window
Luft and Ingham created this technique in 1955 to help  people understand relationships with themselves and others. Since then, it’s been successfully used in helping people improve their learning, knowledge and skill set in various subjects. I personally think this is a great addition to Dunning-Kruger Effect, as it gives a way for people to identify their blind spots and take action to make those spots smaller ‘REALISATION‘ in the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Again there is loads of information out there to read and if this is something that interests you, definitely do some research.

Below is a version of the Johari Window, I have created for divers. This is what I have come up with, and I am sure there are a number of different ways this could have been done, and most likely better ways too (I’m no expert). This is for me to get my thoughts across in a graphical way that I hope many will understand.

So what does this all mean? There are 4 areas of the window, which compares an individual’s knowledge to the groups, along two axis. From Left to Right we look at the individuals knowledge, where Top to Bottom looks at the groups knowledge. As to be expected the group has knowledge which it shares with the individual, making it commonly KNOWN.  The group can also expect to have knowledge the individual doesn’t, and the individual will recognise this exists but cannot see it full to understand as it is a BLIND SPOT for them. In contrast to this, the individual will have some knowledge the rest of the group does not have, so will be HIDDEN from the group. Then last there will be the UNKNOWN, neither the group or individual will know about this. The group I am referring to in this example is, the divers you dive with regularly and even incorporates the Agency / Instructor you always use.

Now when we start something new, the areas of the window are different sizes, with the KNOWN being relatively small. The challenge is not to assume and believe that the KNOWN area is larger than it actually is otherwise it will lead you up Mount Stupid. To progress in anything we must increase the size of the KNOWN area which can only be done by reducing the other areas down.

To make this change, we can concentrate on a number of areas, and with the right actions, motivation and desire to change, these areas can be reduced. Below is the graphic highlighting how this can be done.

One thing to be mindful of is, you will only ever be able to increase the size of the KNOWN area by a certain amount within your group. Once you have approached that limit or near it, focus should be made on how you can expand the group or select a different group. Changing buddies, Instructor, Dive School, Agency or the fabulous invention that is Social Media (said with a little bit or sarcasm). Now, what you know may not be correct, and this is where the beauty of this model comes in (as long as you are always expanding that group), sharing and asking.

Reducing that BLIND SPOT is all about ASKING, asking your group why they do something, asking for training etc.  Even if you think you know something they do is wrong or not as efficient or safe as something else, you need to know what the reasoning is behind it.
Challenging that HIDDEN area is about DISCLOSING what you know and getting EXPOSURE. This means putting your thoughts and knowledge out there to help increase the knowledge of your group, but also as I touched on above that wider group/community. This will help highlight if what you know is correct or not, or if there is a different approach. As you do this you knowledge increases and you will learn about areas you didn’t even know existed. While you may not have the knowledge for these areas at first, you will now know they exist and that journey of DISCOVERY is underway.

To bring this process to life a little, I am going to take the subject of ‘Out of Air’. I am going to make a huge presumption that the majority of people reading this will have learned to keep the Octo/Alternative Reg in the imaginary triangle between your chin and nipples coming under the right arm. By speaking or talking to your initial group, you find alternative methods of attaching that Octo, magnetic clips as an example. By choosing a new Agency and going on a course, you will find some agencies teach the Octo coming off the other side of the 1st Stage. You  learning and find that having the Reg coming off the opposite side offers greater flexibility when dealing with an OOA emergency. You go back and share this with the larger/extended group (ie through social media) to see if your knowledge stands up. Someone in that larger group then informs you of something called a long hose and primary donation, something you and your normal group knew nothing about! (Discovery). So you once again you go off and learn, increasing that known area. Then you go back to the larger group maybe challenging the idea of giving the Regulator you are breathing to an OOA causality. Someone in that group then highlights, with mixed gas diving, being open to someone snatching your Reg from your mouth could save your life, as you could end up breathing a dangerous mixture. What’s this about dangerous mixtures you ask and so the circle continues.

As a diver you have a few of choices;

1)      Assume you know everything and enjoy your camp on top of mountian.

2)      Accept that you do not know everything, but happily stay in the KNOWN area.

3)      Accept that you do not know everything but work to expand that knowledge.

Choice 3 can be challenging and hard, especially at first. As I said near the start I thought I knew a lot, even now on easy dives I find it easy to fall into area of I know everything. I do try and battle this, by always trying to find out something new, even if it’s a simple question of asking a buddy why they have kit setup a certain way. I sometimes try to do something different such as take a different approach to the dive briefing, all in hopes I can learn something, and prove I am no longer on Mount Stupid :-).

Thanks for reading, I hope you got something out of it! Let me know either way.

G-SAV