Excellence in Technical Diving Instruction
By: David Caldwell
Introduction & Background
Technical diving has become more accessible and more diverse both in its application and who engages in it. For example, the industry has seen a proliferation of different types of rebreathers (e.g., side mount, chest mount), specialized equipment like DPVs at lower entry costs, and the availability of equipment in both size and type all of which enables a broader demographic of divers to participate in it. Consequently, technical diving education has needed to evolve and adapt in order to meet market demands.
Divers funnel into technical diving from various points in a training progression hierarchy. For example, a technical diver may enter rebreather training without having maximized the range of open circuit technical diving through advanced trimix training. A diver may prefer to enter technical diving in a side mount configuration and not in back mounted doubles, a path more traditional in training progression. This presents instructors or facilities that offer technical diving instruction both a challenge and an opportunity, which is whether to be specialized or attempt to be broad in addressing a larger segment of the market. A specialized approach enables a hyper focus on excellence in that specific configuration, but that may segregate out a large portion of the relevant and addressable dive education market. Conversely, trying to be good at everything may mean one becomes excellent at nothing.
Our approach with the training we offer through our business, Northern Atlantic Dive Expeditions, has been to focus on specific types of training and education with expansion and diversification based on what we believe we can do extremely well, and what meets the needs of our clients. If it is not something we offer, or not our current focus, we will refer to someone like-minded within our network that we believe can offer the level of quality we would expect of our own program. Some of this approach is rooted in our own personal experience and journey through technical diving, as our experiences shape our views and inform the choices we make in pursuit of both diving interests and training. Some of this approach is rooted in having a learning mindset and recognizing that technical diving has evolved, equipment and applications change and therefore we should be open-minded to those possibilities.
Over the course of the past twenty-five years our focus has evolved and shifted, as we would expect. However, at the core of our training and education programs is one of the most important classes for a technical diver: the introduction to technical diving course. While this class has various names and different core requirements depending on the training agency, all versions of this class aim to do something critical to future success: establish the necessary and foundational skills for technical diving.
This course has been at the core of our educational programs because it is the beginning and the best time to help set someone on a path to future success. Training agency standards and procedures and curriculum guide the minimum requirements; however, with any course and particularly this one, more is often required. With entry to technical diving, an instructor is meeting a student where they are at. This means an acknowledgment of the quality of their recreational diving training and what gaps exist. It also means the instruction must include education that results in a mindset shift about planning, discipline and risk management, which are core concepts in technical diving. Importantly, meeting pre-requisites on paper does not mean a diver is prepared for the real-world application of those capabilities in a diving class. Yet, turning someone away seems like a failure to provide the very thing they are seeking: education and enablement.
Diving education involves instruction, coaching and mentoring. These are all distinct things not meant to exist in isolation. Instruction is about teaching a curriculum associated with a course, coaching is about focused, oftentimes 1-1 training on specific areas for development. Mentoring is about continuing to learn, grow and be guided along the journey of technical diving.
Our training and education programs blend classes with coaching and mentoring for these reasons. Divers enter technical diving training with an established skillset (noting that it may have limitations). Advancing that diver through a training schema towards their goals requires in many cases acceptance of where they are at, defining a path for them and with them towards their goals and then executing it with the resources and approaches that are available. Whether teaching an introductory course or a more advanced level technical diving class, these guiding principles apply. This means classes sometimes run longer, additional dives are required, and meaningful real world diving experience needs to be gained in between classes through active diving and mentoring.
Instructor development takes a similar approach and elevates in importance because the candidate is under consideration for a credential that allows them to educate others, which means not only are the quality of individual level skills critical but this person must be capable of managing a student coming with all of the strengths and challenges discussed above. This is to say, the stakes are high because an instructor’s effectiveness can significantly impact the student’s future capabilities to dive safely and achieve their goals. Ultimately our philosophy has always been consistent with the concept of whether or not we’d trust this individual to teach our loved one. To become an instructor, the answer has to be yes. Let’s explore further by going into greater detail about what makes a truly great technical instructor.
Observation and Diagnosis
As a technical diving instructor it is not enough to just be an excellent diver. Great instructors set an example and model the behaviors such as humility, acknowledging and debriefing mistakes and normalize talking about and reporting errors. Understanding of human factors such as the non-technical skills that address decision-making, situational awareness, psychological safety, just culture and teamwork is a must-have as a core element of human factors instructor literacy. A great instructor lives those values and never stops learning, recognizing that learning is a continuous process requiring reinvestment into one’s own education. This means staying current both with credential status and through one’s own personal skill development whether that is through peer feedback, coaching or additional training.
For example, in our own professional development, we have enrolled in classes and formal coaching purely for learning and critical assessment of our skills to refresh and avoid skill fade. As instructors, this can also allow one to gain insights, tips and new techniques that we can take back into our own program.
Certification versus Capability
The objective of training is to ensure divers are prepared for what they will encounter in their diving. A certification card certifies that under known conditions, skill performance met the required minimum standards. However, the capability of an individual is variable and is influenced by the circumstances at a given point in time. This is to say that capability, not certification, is what kicks in when something happens during a dive. The certification provides knowledge and skills, but capability to execute is the real test of success. The instructor must teach to the curriculum and help the student prepare for the variability they will encounter when diving beyond the class. Instructors must be developed in the same way.
What a certification means is a challenging topic when it comes to managing expectations, expectations of the student, and everyone who that person will encounter as they go forth into diving within the scope of the certification. For example, can the dive charter boat operator rely on the certification to know that individual can handle diving on a day with rough conditions? How to draw the distinction between certification and capability is challenging. Instructors are paid for classes and students expect a certification. Extending the course duration for more coursework has unfavorable financial conditions for an instructor and perhaps the student, such as in cases where travel is involved. The optics of failed classes may even create a negative perception about the instructor. But passing a diver with marginal performance? No one is served by advancing a diver who is unprepared to dive at the level the certification allows.
A capable diver is one with command of skills and the right mindset. In both diver and professional development, our goal should be recognition that certification means minimum requirements have been met and that building upon that knowledge is necessary. It is reasonable to hypothesize there is a relationship between the complexity of the diving and readiness to embark upon this diving on the basis of certification alone. Said another way, if the diving is more complex, higher risk and conditions under which training occurred were highly controlled, despite certification requirements being met, capability may not be sufficiently developed to manage the diversity of circumstances someone may encounter during diving such that they can all be effectively managed. This is a provocative if not controversial statement but one that if we accept as true informs how we help students prepare for what happens after certification. And this is instilling in them use of judgement, recognition of human factors, behaving with humility and curiosity and seeking out mentors to implement their newly certified skills.
Observation & Diagnosis
When we are thinking about what makes a great technical diving instructor we need to talk about the capabilities of the instructor more specifically. Correcting problems is different than solving them. For example, correcting a problem with a student struggling to reach double cylinder valves to perform a shut down and switch over procedure could involve instructing them to tip over, hike up the tanks and grab the valves. We would all agree however this is not the solution. A great instructor will find the root cause, identify the solutions and implement them with the student. Perhaps the student has an issue with balance and stability because of equipment adjustment and body position. A great instructor provides the solution, not just a fix for the moment.
Pattern recognition helps instructors spot these issues quickly and fix them. Some of that comes from exposure through working with many students and some of it comes from the process of mentoring, co-teaching or auditing classes. It is not always possible to teach high volumes of classes. For example, a geographic area may not have a large diving community or be a diving destination. A local instructor will need to seek out the expertise that enables pattern recognition in other ways. Instructors should be encouraging peer circles, collaboration and shared learning, not seeing one another as competitors.
There are the more macro signals instructors learn to spot and then there are the micro signals such as learning to read a student and detect when stress levels are rising, situational awareness is dropping out or panic could be setting in. These skills are also learned through exposure and getting to know students. For these reasons, the more quickly psychological safety is established the more quickly an instructor can detect signs of stress or intervene to find the solution.
Video recordings during class skills are a highly effective means of observation and diagnosis. For one, it eliminates or at least minimizes debate about whether or not a skill was not being demonstrated as imagined. It also creates a resource to talk through the lesson in a post-dive or skill debrief without distractions. With a retrospective review, additional observations may stand out. This kind of resource married up with pattern recognition and applied knowledge provides solutions not just fixes. Students come away with knowledge that they too can apply to future situations. For example, they may be better prepared to assemble a warm water diving configuration from a cold water configuration because they understand the factors that influence stability and balance in a diving configuration.
Debriefing Quality
In the previous section we alluded to the concept of debriefing. At the level of technical diving the importance cannot be overstated. The debrief is self-reflective and is a powerful means of learning. A structured framework is foundational because it provides for the collection of facts, the process of analysis and synthesis of the information that is transferrable or carries forward. The purpose of a structured format is to make it objective, comprehensive and repeatable. In addition this enables the right balance of praise and critical feedback. A framework with a process might make raising difficult topics or having a difficult conversation easier, and this should be seen as linked to the ability to establish and sustain psychological safety.
For example, the Human Diver utilizes a structured framework called “DEBrIEF” (Define, Example, Background, Review, Internal, External, Fix/File/Follow-up) that helps teams assess non-technical aspects of diving and learn why decisions made sense in the moment, shifting the discussion from assigning blame to understanding why something happened and how it can be prevented in the future. In our training programs, we use pre and post dive structured debriefs to unpack the why behind how well a dive was executed. We also have incorporated the Human Diver curriculum into our own, making completion a requirement of certification in a technical diving course.
In instructor training, an instructor debriefing their own performance particularly in peer circles can be a powerful way to demonstrate a commitment to just culture and openness to improvement. A truly great technical diving instructor uses a debrief methodology in their personal and professional diving.
Progression and Readiness
We’ve discussed the relationship between certification and capability. What informs this balance is experience, which is where there is growth and a solidifying of the skills that truly make someone ready to encounter the application of those skills in real world circumstances. The standards that inform whether certification criteria have been met are indeed the minimums. The rest is judgment. The instructor must judge whether the student’s readiness accompanies meeting those requirements for certification. Training agencies can install gates between classes that act as a forcing function to catalyze this process such as a minimum of 25 dives of a certain depth or type before a diver has met pre-requisites to enroll in the next class. Regardless, the burden falls upon the instructor whether it is the one conducting the current class or the future instructor conducting the next class. Has there been a sufficient amount of experience gained to inform readiness for the next level?
A truly great technical diving instructor possesses the tools to make this assessment. They are a combination of technical and non-technical skills. A learning mindset, someone with pattern recognition capabilities, someone capable of a difficult conversation and in possession of solutions.
Scenario Design
Scenario design refers to creating realistic situations with a safety net that serve as a diagnostic tool to show where strengths and weaknesses may lie as skill work is applied to capability. Scenarios such as creating gas failures by using a bubble stream near the valves will create actual stress without something actually happening. The situation is still safe, the diver has gas and an intact, functioning system, but the external bubble stream flow is startling and distracting. The diver’s breathing pattern may change, the brain kicks into what it thinks is the right action testing retention of procedures, buoyancy shifts, teammates engage and this is when one can observe whether performance under known conditions is likely to hold up under unknown conditions.
Scenarios attempt to replicate how accidents actually occur where incidents unfold sometimes slowly and compound in a chain of events that overwhelms and drives panic. Unrealistic scenarios can have a negative effect and should not go too far so as to represent unrealistic situations or be perceived as hazing. They should be progressive in nature to add complexity once success has been demonstrated in previous scenarios. Execution of scenarios can be confidence building and provide students, and instructor candidates, with a real assessment of readiness.
A truly great technical diving instructor assesses readiness through use of scenarios during training and skill demonstration that tests the capacity and capability of the student to execute skills taught under ideal conditions. If one were to consider the perspective that the worst performance of a skill is the best performance one could hope for in a real situation, that may provide a valuable insight into readiness for certification.
Student Psychology and Stress
Stress will be experienced in technical diving. Controlled exposure to stress helps desensitize divers and builds resilience. But overload of stress has a negative effect, driving avoidance, anxiety and poor response. Ego is a safety issue because it presents overconfidence or masks anxiety out of fear of being judged as weak. The absence of psychological safety makes it difficult if not impossible to address ego, and make space for managed, healthy stress. For example, it should be safe to say that one was not comfortable on that dive. It might be because of a communication issue or a misunderstanding that could be solved with a better pre-dive briefing and team plan. A debrief framework could potentially tease this out. A student may experience stress for reasons that are addressable. But if they never speak up or feel as though they cannot, then that stress becomes toxic to creating a safe, confident diver with capability.
Cognitive load theory says that new skills consume working memory and task-loaded students may be incapable of processing and absorbing the instruction. Cognitive overload must be avoided by exposing students to stress in a controlled manner or removing that stress until they are ready to be exposed to it.
For example, when conducting experience dives in our Technical Diver class, we watch closely for signs of stress and anxiety prior to the dive, which we expect to see given this will be their deepest dive to date. As part of the pre-dive briefing we talk about how feeling some anxiety is normal and to remember what they learned in the critical skills sessions. And it is OK to speak up about anything in particular they may be worried about such as the visibility or current. These pre-dive briefings, building on an already established culture of psychological safety make it possible for them to speak up and talk about it—and we do!
A truly great instructor makes space for discussion on ego and stress, and can create psychological safety by naming it and using tools that draw it out and enable solutions, avoiding the circumstances in which anxieties persist that have not been mitigated despite certification.
Student Psychology and StressIndustry Weaknesses
Technical diving requires a significant investment of money and time both for students and instructors. Profit margins are small, time requirements are sought to be minimized, particularly when overhead and competition is considered, all of which create real tension in pricing and carrying out a class on schedule. Cost leadership tends to be prioritized when other factors are less differentiating (such as instructor reputation or status or attracting a specific phenotype of student seeking out specific experiences).
These pressures can translate into lower quality instructor development programs that fast track instructors and prioritize pay-per-certification incentives. An instructor that issues a high number of certifications can present a misleading picture of their excellence as that metric may also be used to assess the quality of the instructor (i.e., this person is very active and therefore experienced and that means they are good at what they do). Regardless of volume of certifications, an instructor is teaching at the ceiling of their own personal capability.
Inconsistent enforcement of standards, instructors that may be drifting from quality standards because of cost pressure and normalization of deviance throughout the ecosystem undermine the ability to foster excellence in technical diving education.
So what can we do about it? We can start by naming it and assessing our own behavior. Are we contributing to this even if intentions are good or are we breaking from it to provide a superior experience for ourselves and our students? Honest reflection is required here. A truly great technical diving instructor understands ecosystem gaps and pressures and participates as a professional in the industry to advocate for fit for purpose change.
Post-course Development
We have discussed mentorship earlier in this article and the value it brings, but how mentorship happens is not well defined in general and subject to a great deal of variability and even debate. The first question is what is mentorship and whose job is it to bridge the student from a certification class into real world diving? Is it the instructor, the agency or the community?
Mentorship takes many forms from more structured models with post-course interactions and dive planning to alumni circle diving to networking with experienced divers to onboard into their teams. The burden naturally falls on the instructor to facilitate these first steps. Understandably, the instructor may have concerns where the line sits between their instructor responsibility and potential liability and when the diver’s responsibility begins.
Our mentoring program includes having the certified technical diver join on dive charters with “the regulars” who are routinely on the boat. They have the opportunity to network, meet potential new teammates and see what good looks like in a real world setting (i.e., how divers prepare when the conditions are rough, when someone calls a dive, get tips on how to get down the line efficiently in current). Many of our students take additional classes from us or engage in 1-1 coaching sessions to work on specific areas for improvement or seek our input when making their next step whether that is into cave diving or purchasing a rebreather. We want students to know we’re a resource for them. However, we must also use judgment to determine when an ask goes beyond what we would view as mentoring and potentially into something that could pose risks for us.
Mentorship has a role in post technical diving class diver development but without structure, a pathway and expectations mentorship won’t be effective. A truly great technical diving instructor creates space for mentoring even if it is informal. This can include socializing, networking and some guidance on what types of questions a former student should feel comfortable reaching out about. Mentoring should have boundaries though and defining those is an individual process based on the type of instruction, the community in which one participates and the amount of time available to devote to the activity.
The Future
The future of technical diving education will be a dynamic and arguably complex one. For agencies and instructors, it will require a thoughtful training matrix that considers the various pathways someone may take in their journey into and through technical diving, but it also requires recognition changes are needed.
Human factors integration should be seen as a must-have, non-negotiable. Non-technical skills accompanying technical skills create a holistic and balanced education. Technology should also be seen as enabling but used with clear intent. For example, video-based debriefs using structured formats should be core to every curriculum, but use of data such as rebreather controller logs might be more nuanced. Data may become part of the student record providing proof of training through submissions of logs and data from diving computers. Some of these things may become requirements of insurance companies as quality assurance standards, which will drive consolidation of the instructor market and put more pressure on the ecosystem.
While the diving industry will continue to evolve and diving accident litigation outcomes may drive shifts in quality assurance policies, one’s personal reputation will always be the real credential. Are you a technical diving instructor who is trusted to teach someone’s loved one to technical dive?
