Teaching diving can be one of the most rewarding jobs you will ever do. The feeling you get when you see the joy of a new diver in the water is hard to beat. As a dive instructor you can work all over the world in some of the most exotic locations.

Is It Hard?

The path to becoming an Instructor is actually quite simple, however the path to becoming a GREAT Instructor is a little more difficult.  In all our courses we teach more than the minimum and or instructor programs are not different, however with our Instructor programs we require our students to demonstrate more than the minimum requirements to enter the program.

How do I become a GREAT Instructor?

To qualify to start an Instructor program you need only be a Dive Master and have 100 logged dives or more. Although some people will become great instructors when they enter the program with bear minimum requirement, many will not be as comfortable and confident as you need to be to become a great instructor. To join a Shiprock Dive instructor program you must have the above minimum as well as passing a tuff inwater assessment of your diving skills (if you did your Dive Master Course with Shiprock Dive you have already passed this). The Shiprock inwater assessment will look at your buoyancy control, your ability to assess conditions, entry and exit techniques, navigation and finally rescue skills. All the skills we assess are things that a properly trained and experienced dive master would be capable of and are also skills that will be honed during your instructor program. The reason we do this is two fold, first there are many dive centers out there that simply take people's money and certify them for course after course up to and including Dive Master (some times called zero to hero) without the student ever doing any real independent diving, these people may be able to perform well in training but when put out in a real situation they usually don't handle the pressure and thus the will not make good instructors, but don't despair if you feel you fit this category we will work with you and get you ready to enter your instructor training (normally you will just need to go diving and get more experience). The second reason is that people who are on a Shiprock Dive instructor course have paid good money to be trained to become "Great" instructors, if we take every one who has the minimum standard of training on paper and don’t check them out, then we will end up with instructor candidates who need to be retrained during their instructor program which takes time away from every one else and results in the other candidates not getting the level of training they deserve and require to be come "great" instructors.