Work while doing what you love: Become a PADI Professional

Feel like you belong under the sea swimming with magnificent creatures instead of sitting at the office feeling burn out? What if we told you that this all can change? What if you could work and dive every day? Anyone with passion and motivation, from a non-diver to a certified diver, can become a PADI professional (dive instructor or Divemaster). You can go from working in a stressful environment to a leading diver sharing your passion and knowledge with students about the deep blue sea. How long this will take depends on your drive to become a PADI professional.

Of course, the diving lifestyle isn’t only about lounging by the beach, there’s work to be done. What are the steps to becoming a PADI professional and what do they mean? Let’s look at them from the beginning of your diving career!

1. In PADI’s Open Water course, you’ll learn the fundamentals of diving safely.
2. During your Advanced Course, you improve and advance your skills. You will learn to navigate underwater and also to dive deeper up to 30 meters. You will also pick other areas of diving that interest you and learn more about them: drift diving, underwater photography, fish identification, there are lots of option to choose from.
3. During your Rescue course, you will learn how to prevent unwanted scenarios and how to respond to diving emergencies, anticipate for them, and find a solution to these problems.
4. Becoming a PADI Divemaster is the first step of your professional diving career, it allows you to grow as a leader and improve your diving skills
5. The PADI IDC teaches you how to pass down the knowledge and teach your students. It gives you the opportunity to practice your skills before demonstrating them to an examiner from PADI to prove that you are ready. You are able to take your IE almost anywhere in the world. The same standards are applied worldwide.

At this point, all you need now is to have a minimum amount of dives to begin and end your Divemaster course, and a minimum number to become an instructor. These dives can either be logged during your PADI training or be a fun dive. One option you can consider to rack up more dives is getting certified in the PADI Specialty Diver courses. These can be a great investment for your future as a professional diver since they’ll expose you to numerous specialized diving activities.

Finally, you’ll be a PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor, also known as an OWSI. Remember all of the courses you just took to get here? You are now in the position to teach them. A new PADI OWSI can teach the following courses:

• PADI Open Water Diver
• PADI Advanced Open Water Diver
• PADI Rescue Diver
• PADI Divemaster
• Peak Performance Buoyancy (Specialty course)
• Project AWARE (Specialty course)
• AWARE – Coral Reef Conservation (Specialty course)

You can also conduct diving experiences such as Discover Scuba, Bubblemaker, and SealTeam. You can teach most of the dive courses, but there are some programs that require specific specialty certifications, like the Enriched Air (EANx)/ Nitrox course or the Sidemount diving course.

As a dive professional, you will become a leader/ role model, and experience the joy of working as something you love to do. This is how you can escape from your 8 -5 job, by getting out of that office and into the blue tranquil waters you’ve been craving. It is possible to do what you love for a living, and at Blue Season Bali, we are happy to help in any way. Contact us!