If you have a love for diving and recently graduated from high school or college the diving industry offers multiple possibilities to break into scuba diving careers. If you choose to pursue a career in this field, your earning potential will increase as you gain experience and get more training.
Entry Level Diving Jobs
If you're a certified recreational diver who dreams of making scuba diving your career, you can break into the industry with entry level positions by working in dive stores. This is a great way to pursue your new career path and one of the best ways to learn more about the diving industry so you can determine the focus of your career.
Becoming a Certified Instructor
In order to meet insurance requirements to work in resort areas, as an instructor you'll have to be certified. Many times scuba diving positions combine more than one function into a single job title. Certification will give you the credentials you need to make you an attractive addition to the staff as the employer will only need to hire one person to function in any of these roles.
No matter the direction you plan to take as a diver, if you want to find a quality position, the first step will be to become a certified dive instructor. Once you are a certified, you can fill the role of:
- Divemaster
- Tour guide
- Teacher
Training to Advance in Scuba Diving Careers
Additional training in specialty areas can help you branch out into areas of interest. Possibilities include becoming a specialty instructor in the following areas:
- Boat captain/dive instructor
- Deep diving
- Equipment repair technician
- Equipment specialist
- Marine ecology
- Marine life identification
- Multilevel or computer-assisted diving
- Night diving
- Underwater naturalist
- Underwater photography
- Underwater video
- Wreck diving
Benefits of Resort Training
Working for a resort often requires special resort training which will open the door to a number of possible dive-related positions including:
- Conducting underwater tours
- Completing referrals of students referred for completion of Open Water training
- Maintaining equipment
- Dive instructor
Many resorts offer a salary and commission on classes you teach and sales you make. In some cases housing and health insurance are offered. While the salary itself isn't high, additional earning potential is available through tips. Some resorts place tips into a pool that is divided among the staff.
While all of this may sound like a dream come true, it's important to realize that working for a resort will require hard work and long hours much of the time. While working for a resort does include many benefits, there are also drawbacks. If the resort's traffic is seasonal, work can be slow or non-existent during the off-season. Additionally, the cost of living tends to be higher in resort areas.
Scuba Jobs With Cruise Lines
Scuba diving jobs with cruise lines are another multi-faceted opportunity for travel-oriented scuba diving instructors. Jobs can include anything from supervising water activities like snorkeling to creating marine life slide presentations for the passengers. With this type of job, a great deal of the work may include non-water related tasks. These can include social responsibilities like:
- Organizing social activities
- Planning ship-board parties
- Social presentations
Salary packages usually include
- Base pay
- Commissions
- Room and board
- Medical benefits
Careers in Commercial Diving
Commercial diving opportunities also cover a large range of possibilities for divers skilled in the trades. This is a demanding career that usually requires ten hour days and being out at sea for stretches of anywhere from six to eight weeks. Commercial diving jobs can be broken into two main categories:
- Offshore diving industry - requires being away from home for long periods of time
- Inland coastal commercial diving - allows for a more "normal" work schedule and time at home
Commercial Diving Job Opportunities
Suba diving careers available in the commercial end of the industry include:
- Bridge inspection
- Bridge construction
- Bridge repair
- Gravity surveying
- Hyperbaric chamber operations
- Installation of injection equipment
- Marine environmental control check
- Medical and emergency care for diving accidents
- Operation of diving bells
- Platform construction
- Platform inspection
- Platform maintenance
- Rock drilling and blasting
- Salvage
- Search and recovery
- Underwater surveys
- Underwater welding
When considering a scuba diving career, remember it's a business requiring professionalism. While you'll be able to enjoy diving, your job will also require other responsibilities. If you're ready to work hard, love diving and don't mind taking on tasks like filling tanks, stocking shelves or being a tour guide, a scuba diving career might be just what you're looking for.
