Are work-for-training scuba diving internships worth it?

Training be an instructor with other professionals brings with it a wealth of extra experience (Elizabeta Galitckaia/Shutterstock)

PADI has recently changed its approach to scuba diving internships, encouraging its operators in a key region to advertise work-for-training, ‘free’ divemaster internships. Mark ‘Crowley’ Russell explains why this can be the best – or worst – path to a career as a dive professional

It is widely accepted that internships are one of the best methods of gaining meaningful experience in professions that may go on to become lifelong careers.

They were, once, available only to the medical profession, so if internships are useful for the folk who hold other people’s lives in their hands, then they must assuredly be beneficial to others: dive professionals, for example, who also hold other people’s lives in their hands.

And they would be – but not all internships are equal, and some, quite frankly, are downright dangerous.

Internships for dive professionals are not new. I am a product of such an internship, a ‘zero-to-hero’-style programme (although I started as an Advanced Open Water diver with 70-odd dives already under my weight belt), spread over six months at a busy PADI Career Development Centre in Thailand, which I would later go on to work for.

Some people call such schools ‘sausage factories’ because we turned out several hundred dive professionals each year. But it is a point of view I do not always share, because in that school, we did it really well.

Six months in a busy, resort-based environment means assisting with a variety of courses with different instructors, divemasters, and other interns, while racking up hundreds of dives – excellent preparation for a career in the recreational dive industry.

Rescue diver training as a DMT is fun, but hard work. Getting plenty of experience is essential (Photo: Roy Pedersen/Adobe Stock)

At that time, the PADI Divemaster (DM) Course had two paths to completion: the internship, in which a Divemaster Trainee (DMT) would be mentored by an instructor and assist on real courses while learning their trade; and the Practical Training option, where DMTs would participate in simulated training experiences in which other certified divers or dive professionals would role-play as students.

The Practical Training option was a workaround for the logistical challenges posed by low-traffic dive centres, where the internship could take a very long time to complete, and high-traffic dive centres, where there might not be enough instructors to mentor all the candidates through their training.

This did not mean that divemasters who trained under this method were somehow substandard. At my dive school, the path to professional certification still took several months, and the simulated role plays were often more challenging than dealing with real students, covering a lot of scenarios that many instructors will likely never even encounter.

Nevertheless, there was a downside to the short-form course in that it could easily be completed in under two weeks – and some unscrupulous operators took advantage of this. Roll them in, roll them out – proper sausage factories.

Somewhere around 2010, the PADI Divemaster course was reformatted so that there was just one programme, which could involve either real courses or simulated role plays. I didn’t agree with all the changes at the time, but it fixed the logistical problems of the two paths to certification, and helped prevent the unscrupulous abuse, although the concept of the ‘internship’ was quietly dropped.

WORK FOR TRAINING DIVE INTERNSHIPS

I have been asked many times about internships which involve working for ‘free’ training, and my fairly standard response has been that they are not usually free and may even end up being substantially more expensive.

I also have to note that I am talking about the paths to resort-based recreational dive pro certification, which is a very, very
different animal to the idea of helping out at the local dive club in the evenings and at weekends.

Until recently I would have said that internships that you pay for are always going to be better, because you are making a transaction with a dive centre concerning a product that has definite – and finite – requirements, packaged with agreed-upon materials and allocated time.

Work-for-training, on the other hand, may be fluid and less well structured. Depending on the job description, the dive centre’s paying customers are the business’s priority, not the intern.

If there is other work that needs to be done, then training may need to be rescheduled, to the detriment of both instructor and candidate – and in a busy dive centre, there is a lot of work that needs to be done.

Day-to-day tasks such as meeting and greeting customers, cleaning the dive centre and its rinse tank, windows, floors and lavatories; washing dive kit, loading boats and filling the next day’s tanks – a slow, tiresome and thankless job – are all aspects of a dive centre that a divemaster trainee would be expected to get involved in, but they are not necessarily requirements for certification.

A work-for-training intern, however, is essentially an unpaid employee, and so now all those many menial tasks are very much required, otherwise there will be no training.

Filling tanks is a slow and often thankless task, but it is an absolutely essential skill to learn (Photo: Nuvaframe/Shutterstock)

Also, for how long would a candidate be expected to work in order to guarantee certification within a certain time frame? Four months? Six? ‘By the end of the summer holiday’?

There are two problems I encountered with work-for-training internships, particularly when I was working in Thailand, where regulations could be … less stringent, shall we say, than Europe.

The first was that dive centres would just engage in what might best be termed ‘indentured servitude’; an entire dive season’s worth of free labour for a course which, at that time, was perhaps only worth five or six hundred dollars.

Meanwhile, the interns would have to cover the cost of their accommodation, food, insurance, visa and other living expenses, making the ‘free’ training substantially more expensive than a paid-for course.

Many of these people would finish a season, if they even got that far, and never work in the dive industry again.

The second, and worse problem, was that people would be certified in return for work without ever being properly trained.

I once asked a candidate on the first day of an Instructor Development Course (IDC) to demonstrate a pre-dive safety check as he might to a student. He looked his buddy up and down, turned him around, twiddled his tank valve, slapped him on the shoulder and said ‘good to go!’

I was rather amazed he was even still alive, never mind a certified dive professional.

It turned out he’d never learned to demonstrate the core skills in accordance with the standards required by PADI’s Instructor Examiners because he’d helped out at a friend’s dive shop over the summer in return for his DM certification and, when the summer ended, he’d been certified, but, apparently, not properly trained.

INSIDER TIPS:

Always read the small print – ALL of the small print
Make sure you know exactly what you’re getting for your money – ‘free’ training may not include materials and agency certification fees
Think carefully about your timescale and budget – living expenses build up quickly
Working for training means working – so check what’s in the job description
Ask lots of questions, expect lots of answers
Never be afraid to walk away

ARE WORK-FOR-TRAINING INTERNSHIPS WORTH IT?

The price of professional courses varies across the world, but between £1,000 and £1,500 for a divemaster course, including training materials and certification fees, would be a reasonable price for good-quality training. Double that figure for instructor programmes.

Most of the currently available DM courses are advertised as being around four weeks in length, which will be full days of training during which candidates will be expected to carry out some of the menial dive centre tasks.

This work will be expected to be performed, however, as part of the paid-for training programme, and there are no operators that would consider any work undertaken during this four-week period as part payment for the course.

Paying off a professional-level course takes months, perhaps a whole dive season, meaning the cost of living is substantially increased and – depending on location – may entirely eliminate the cost-benefit ratio of the ‘free’ training.

My overriding concern with regard to dive professional internships is that people know exactly what they are getting when they plunge headlong into uncharted waters.

A fixed-term, fixed-price internship and some basic research will give divers a good idea of what they’re signing up for, as opposed to ‘work for us and we’ll fit you in when we can.’

This is why I like PADI’s attempt to bring back the concept of a formal internship, and encourage its dive centres to advertise work-for-training versions on its jobs board. PADI didn’t reply to my question as to why this has been brought about (nor why it’s currently restricted to its Europe, Middle East and Africa region), but I view it as a positive move.

Although I am not plugging that agency specifically, making the internships official agency policy means that there is now some oversight on the way that they are conducted, which will I hope spill over across the rest of the industry.

I would therefore encourage those considering a work-for-training path into a dive career to at least use this idea as a baseline for research, even if they eventually choose to sign up with a different provider.