Starting your diving career
If you are planning to become a recreational diving professional, reading this page will help you find some important information and possible answers to information you need when planning your dive career.
Check out the pages on the Raya Divers website about different diving courses and programs required to become a professional. The first professional level is a PADI Divemaster. When you intensively participate in different courses one after the other you will quickly learn diving theory, diving skills, planning dives, conducting dives, rescue skills and generally how to organize diving activities.
However, to be a real professional you need experience that can not be taught by just doing courses. This means that at the start of your career you get involved in the real action of a team as much as possible. Everyday you will meet all different kinds of customers; find yourself in situations and problems that no course can provide the right answers for. You will learn by doing it in real situations.
As in any field, finding your first job after finishing your education is the hardest. Many people have a wrong picture in their mind how to start their diving career and wonder why after finishing their Divemaster course they can’t find a well-paid Divemaster job. Diving is a career that your first need to gain some experience and possible extra training at their own cost. Also when you are looking for your first job do not put your expectations for the salary and job tasks too high.
Remember that most probably all the other people working in the dive center are more experienced than you. When looking at your first job as a diving professional one of the most useful tips we can give you is that you ask yourself: What can I do that could benefit the dive center? Your experience could be something not related to diving: computers, graphic design, engine service or whatever. Remember that running a dive center involves many moving parts and being underwater is just one of them.
So after you get your first Divemaster job, you have done a bit of assisting and guiding with “food, bed” & salary it is time to start to plan your next move. Plans are unlimited depending on what direction you want your career to go to. You could continue your Divemaster job further, maybe take some extra courses on boating and navigation and apply for a tour leader position on a liveaboard vessel or a daytrip boat. Another option is to go for the Instructor Course and start to teach scuba diving as your profession. Note that being a tour leader and teaching scuba diving is very different from each other, often the latter is more well-paid.
You can get higher levels of PADI training like Specialty Instructor and IDC Staff instructor levels as well as achieve higher instructor ratings. You can also get your foot into the technical diving in the DSAT instructor courses or educate yourself more in the generally useful courses like Advanced First Aid, teaching people with disabilities, recompression chamber training, DAN-training etc…
Naturally during the years, while your diving experience and knowledge is increasing, you will get more and more interesting and well-paid positions. On the long term you might be heading for a dive center manager position or possibly aiming to start to train instructors one day. Just remember that nothing happens in a day, like it doesn’t in any other professional field either.
Every year Raya Divers takes thousands of holiday makers on different kinds of dive trips and excursions and also trains over 1000 students to become divers. So Raya Divers also employs several diving professionals and young people that are aiming to become dive professionals. In a dive center offering many kinds of trips, programs and courses there are many kinds of work tasks and all kinds of special knowledge is always needed on top of the diving skills.
If you are already a diving professional and your would like to be part of the Raya Divers team, send us a full CV including photo where you should describe your diving experiences and also your experiences from other fields, sometimes called ”experience in the previous life”.
If not a pro yet but diving interests you as a profession, don’t waste any more time but sign up for training. Maybe at some point of your training you can cover part of the course expenses with work in some specialty area or stay after the course in practical training to gain more experience.
When applying for a job for the high season at Raya Divers, CVs are needed at the latest by the start of June. During the summer there is interviews and the real action starts from the beginning of November and our high season continues to the end of April. Inquiries and CVs for the work positions please send to jani@rayadivers.com