Or is it better to take more time and gain experience slowly? No rush, no shortcuts?
There are many opinions saying that it’s not worth doing a “Zero to Divemaster” program in just a few weeks or months. The argument is that such professionals don’t have enough experience; they just jump from course to course, gaining certifications without learning much. People often say that this process should be slow, taking even a year or longer, and that you need at least 100 dives, with some suggesting even 300 dives, before becoming skilled in this profession. But is that really true?
Who Am I?
My name is Angie Jodzis, and I am an SSI Instructor Trainer. For over six years, I’ve been traveling the World as a diving instructor of PADI and SSI. I’ve completed more than 3,500 dives and trained thousands of divers worldwide. I’ve worked in many dive centers, on different continents, and in various waters—both warm and cold. I’ve worked with fresh instructors and very experienced ones. I’ve had the pleasure of teaching divers with a lot of experience, as well as complete beginners. I believe I have enough knowledge and experience to give my own opinion for those who are at the beginning of their path.
My Experience and Opinion
Becoming a professional diver involves both a technical and personal journey. It’s not just about racking up dives but about learning, adapting, and growing as a diver under proper mentorship. The key is to build confidence, knowledge, and practical skills at each step.
What special talents do you need to have?
The good news: no extraordinary talent is required! However, certain qualities can make the process smoother:
- Comfort in Water: Being at ease underwater and confident in your swimming abilities is essential.
- Open-Mindedness: Stay ready to learn and embrace new skills.
- Physical Fitness: Being “fit to dive” ensures safety and stamina.
- Focus and Dedication: Stay committed to the process and tasks at hand.
What Really Matters
Becoming a good diver is straightforward, and becoming a good divemaster is just as achievable if you focus on the following:
Active Engagement
Stay involved, practice deliberately, and absorb feedback. A proactive attitude goes a long way.
Choose the Right Mentor
A mentor shapes your learning and inspires you. They’ll ensure you’re ready to tackle real-world diving scenarios, not just tick boxes.
Quality Over Quantity
Having 500+ dives doesn’t mean you’re ready. I’ve seen divemasters with years of experience who were less prepared than someone with only 60 dives but who focused on learning the right way. What you learn from your dives is more important than how many you’ve done.
Steps to Become a Competent Divemaster
By following these steps and staying committed, you’ll not only earn your certifications but also become a competent and confident professional diver ready to work anywhere in the world. The journey may challenge you, but it will also be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life!
1. Water Fitness Evaluation
You don’t need to be a champion swimmer, but you do need basic swimming ability and confidence in the water. This makes all the difference when dealing with challenging dive conditions. Here’s what’s required:
- Swimming Test:
To become a professional diver, you’ll need to:- Treading water for 15 minutes
- Swimming 700 meters within 20 minutes using a mask, fins, and snorkel (most of my students, aged 20–50, can easily do it in less than 14 minutes)
- Swimming underwater for 25 meters using a mask and fins
- Performing a full, unconscious-diver-on-the-surface rescue over a total distance of 100 meters within 8 minutes
- Freediving Skills:
As a divemaster, you’ll also be qualified to teach snorkeling, so having some freediving knowledge can greatly enhance your confidence and abilities underwater. Learning proper breath-holding techniques will help you feel more at ease during dives and while assisting others.
Why Freediving Matters
At Angel Diver, I believe a well-rounded professional diver should have a broad skill set. That’s why we include a Basic Freediving Course in our Divemaster program. This ensures you’re not only confident underwater but also equipped with advanced techniques that can be useful in snorkeling instruction, emergency situations, or even personal challenges.
Freediving training helps improve your breath-hold, underwater awareness, and overall comfort, making you a better dive professional.
2. Open Water Diver (OWD) Course
The first course that you need to take is the Open Water Diver (OWD), which usually takes an intense 3–5 days. During this course, you learn a lot of skills, which will become your foundation for all diving. You’ll learn over 50% of the skills required for recreational diving and gain a lot of essential theoretical knowledge, such as the basics of physics and physiology, as well as the concept of decompression theory, safe diving planning, basic navigation, and a grasp of aquatic environment knowledge. Here you will understand how your scuba diving gear works, how to do regular checkups and basic maintenance. You will learn a lot of skills such as clearing your regulator, regulator retrieval, mask clearing, removal and replacement, performing emergency skills such as handling an out-of-air situation, and much more. It is an intense course, and if you want to do it in a short time, make sure you have the focus of your instructor and enough time underwater to practice those skills more than just once.
The course’s quality depends on where you do it, how intensive it is, the number of students per instructor, and how well you progress. For example, if you’re placed in a group of five to six students with one instructor and the entire course takes only three days, it’s unlikely to be high-quality training, especially if the number of dives is limited and time in the water is restricted because, for example, you are diving from a boat and bound by “back on board” schedules.
From my own experience working at one of those schools, I was once assigned six students, four of whom struggled with equalization. I took extra time to ensure their safety and complete the skills in shallow water, which made me 15 minutes late returning to the boat. Despite it being the afternoon, there was unnecessary drama on board because I delayed the schedule. Some instructors rush through sessions just to get back to land for a beer or the next party.
That’s why I changed where and how I teach. Now, I run basic courses from the shore with a policy of a maximum of two students per instructor and unlimited water time. My focus is on creating confident, competent divers who I’m proud to certify.
At Angel Diver, we focus on quality, not quantity, conducting courses with a 2:1 student-to-instructor ratio. An instructor only has two hands to assist beginner students underwater, so for safety and effective learning, small groups and maximum time in the water are essential.
3. Mastering Buoyancy and Movement Techniques
The next step is to learn full control of your buoyancy and various techniques of movement, like the frog kick, backward kick, helicopter turns, and others. It’s also crucial to master proper trim, which means maintaining a horizontal position underwater.
This step is often skipped, leading to funny and embarrassing situations where “advanced divers” end up diving in a vertical position. At Angel Diver, we emphasize horizontal diving—like a skydiver. It is more efficient and safer! It allows blood flow to move more easily through the body, helps with efficient breathing, and allows better body control, avoiding damage to corals or stirring up the bottom. This will also help you improve your coordination underwater. It’s not difficult to master; it just requires proper hints from the instructor.
During training, especially when we want to fine-tune your buoyancy and techniques, we video-record your diving and analyze it together afterward. This allows us to show you what you’re doing wrong and how to improve. With a small group of two and an instructor focused on you, we can achieve amazing results in just 2-3 days.
It’s not about the number of dives but the quality of those dives and what you learn from them! From my perspective, I’ve dived with “experienced divers” with over 100 logged dives, and their buoyancy control was terrible. Nobody had taught them correctly, and they didn’t even know they looked so bad underwater until I showed them the video.
4. The Myth of Fun Dives
There’s a common belief that to become a good diver, you just need to dive as much as possible—doing fun dives. This is a big misconception!
Let’s say your OWD course was poorly conducted. Then you do 50–100 fun dives to “gain experience.” What kind of experience are you gaining? You keep diving the same way as after your OWD course—struggling with buoyancy, failing to maintain proper position. How many times did you practice basic skills like mask removal and replacement or handling an out-of-air situation during your fun dives? Did you realize the importance of carrying a spare mask with you? What if the mask strap breaks—do you know how to react safely, or are you just relying on luck?
From my own experience, I know that if someone has completed 300–500 dives, it only means they’ve entered and exited the water 300–500 times. What happened during those dives is what matters. Were these training dives where you constantly practiced skills? Or did you just swim around fish without improving?
Diving just for fun, without any intention to improve, is a waste of time if your goal is to reach a professional level. Go for training dives—that’s where you learn the most.
5. Navigation, Night Diving, and Deep Diving
Once you’re confident with basic scuba skills, buoyancy, and movement, the next steps include:
Navigation: Reading maps, planning safe routes, using a compass, and natural navigation techniques to guide the dive from start to finish.
Night and Limited Visibility Diving: These help you build confidence in more challenging conditions. You’ll learn how to use a diving torch, communicate using light signals, and navigate effectively during a night dive.
Deep Diving: Learning to safely dive to 40 meters while understanding the physics, physiology, and risks of deeper dives. Deep diving within no-decompression limits is actually very simple. You won’t feel much difference between 5 meters, 10 meters, or even 30 meters—except for the need to equalize pressure in your ears more frequently as you go deeper due to increasing pressure.
You’ll also notice that you use up air more quickly, so you’ll need to learn how to plan a dive that accounts for your air consumption and how to perform a safe ascent. You’ll practice these techniques on the surface, during classroom sessions. The actual dive itself is an enjoyable experience where you descend deeper than 18 meters but stay within 40 meters.
During these dives, you might experience nitrogen narcosis, and you’ll learn how to recognize and manage its effects. You’ll also review buoyancy control and navigation to ensure you can dive safely and confidently at depth.
How It All Comes Together
These skills might remind you of the Advanced Adventurer (AA) course, where you also get introduced to navigation, night diving, and deep diving (30 meters). However, in the AA course, you typically complete just five adventure dives, which are designed to show you new diving possibilities after the Open Water Diver (OWD) course. While this provides a great introduction, it’s not enough to fully master these skills.
If you truly want to become confident in these areas, you’ll need to dive each type of adventure dive more than once. Repetition and practice are essential for turning these introductory experiences into well-rounded, professional-level skills.
With a solid foundation in OWD and buoyancy control, most students can master navigation, night diving, and deep diving in under a week during focused training.
This advanced training ensures you’re fully prepared to guide others safely and confidently in a wide variety of diving conditions.
6. Rescue Diver Course
Once you’ve mastered buoyancy, navigation, deep diving, and night/limited visibility diving, you can take the Rescue Diver Course (Diver Stress and Rescue).
This is where your journey takes a significant turn. The Rescue Diver course is a game-changer. It’s physically and mentally challenging but incredibly rewarding. You’ll learn how to:
- Respond to emergency situations
- Assist panicked divers above and underwater
- Locate missing divers
- Provide first aid, including CPR, oxygen administration, and using a defibrillator
By this point, you should already feel comfortable in the water. Believe me, after repeated and unexpected mask removal exercises, regulator loss scenarios, and sudden emergency drills such as out-of-air situations, you’ll develop muscle memory. You’ll perform these procedures with your eyes closed, and your comfort level underwater will skyrocket.
A well-conducted Rescue Diver with first aid course usually takes 4–5 days to complete.
7. Science of Diving and Enriched Air Nitrox
These are two dry-land courses that are a must for anyone aiming to become a dive professional.
The Science of Diving course [part of Divemaster course] is an essential part of your journey to becoming a professional diver. It covers in-depth topics such as:
- Physics of Diving: Understanding how pressure, buoyancy, and gases behave underwater.
- Physiology: Learning how diving affects the human body and how to stay safe.
- Decompression Theory: Exploring how to plan dives safely and avoid decompression sickness.
In a quality Divemaster course, you’ll often have the opportunity to:
- Visit a Hyperbaric Chamber: Gain firsthand knowledge of how these chambers work, attend expert-led lectures, and understand the treatment of diving-related injuries.
- Explore Equipment Basics: Learn about the construction and basic servicing of dive equipment, a valuable skill for dive professionals.
- Study the Aquatic Environment: Deepen your understanding of marine ecosystems and how to interact with them responsibly.
These topics are vital for becoming a well-rounded professional diver, but don’t worry—your instructor will guide you through each concept clearly and step by step.
Enriched Air Nitrox (EANx): This course teaches you how to dive with enriched air mixtures containing more oxygen (from 22% to 40%) and less nitrogen. Using Nitrox can extend your bottom time or reduce the risk of decompression sickness. However, diving with Nitrox can be dangerous—potentially fatal—if you don’t understand how to calculate the Maximum Operating Depth (MOD). This course will teach you how to recognize oxygen toxicity symptoms, prevent incidents, and react effectively if something goes wrong, whether for yourself or your clients.
Alright, So What’s Next?
By now, we’ve mastered all the exercises from the Open Water Diver (OWD) course. Not only did we practice them during the OWD course itself, but we’ve also repeated them during other training dives. We’ve learned to control our buoyancy and move using different techniques. We can now read a map, create a safe plan for deep dives and dives in limited visibility, and navigate using both a compass and natural landmarks. We’ve also learned how to rescue ourselves and others in emergency situations.
Additionally, we have a deep understanding of the science of diving, including physics, physiology, and decompression theory, and we’re equipped with the knowledge to safely plan and execute dives using Enriched Air Nitrox (EANx) that took another few days in total. So, what’s next?
Now It’s Time for the Divemaster Course!
But what is a Divemaster? A Divemaster is someone who acts as an underwater guide for certified divers! In theory, the people you take underwater should already know how to dive. A Divemaster is someone who feels comfortable in the water, knows how to plan a safe dive, read a map, and decide on the best route for a dive. A Divemaster can plan a dive based on air consumption, and they also know how to recognize and respond to dangerous situations—and how to solve them.
Wait a second… haven’t we already been learning these skills in the previous courses? Exactly!
So, What Do You Learn in the Divemaster Course?
Good question!
During Divemaster training, according to ISO standards, you must master the following:
- All exercises from the OWD course and snorkeling program
- Workshops on perfect buoyancy, navigation, diving in limited visibility, and deep dives
- All exercises from the Rescue Diver course
- How to organize and deliver a dive briefing, which is a key component of a successful dive
- How to conduct a safe dive guide experience underwater
Wait, so does that mean we’re just repeating the exercises from the previous courses? Kinda! 😉
But there’s more. The Divemaster course also focuses on developing skills that are essential for working with clients. These include:
- Talking to clients and interacting with them in a professional and friendly way
- Delivering a clear and engaging pre-dive briefing
- Checking that everyone’s equipment is working properly and that each diver has prepared their gear correctly
- Assigning dive buddies to ensure everyone is paired appropriately
- Ensuring that every diver completes the buddy check
- Safely entering the water and assisting others as they enter
- Knowing how to conduct a safe descent/ascent and ensuring the group stays together
- Monitoring the dive group at all stages: before, during the dive, and after the dive
- Recognizing and responding to all problems that occur during a dive
- Creating a positive and welcoming atmosphere for your clients
In an ideal course, you will gain experience diving both from the shore and from a boat, in environments with both good and low visibility. Look for a diving center that can offer you a variety of experiences, such as boat diving, shore diving, wreck diving, and swim-through dive sites, where you can develop the skills to guide large groups safely, even through caverns.
What Else?
During Divemaster training, ideally, your instructor will also introduce you to:
- Basic freediving skills to improve your underwater awareness and breath-holding techniques
- Hands-on teaching experience by assisting in real courses to build confidence as an instructor’s assistant (a certified Divemaster can act as a qualified assistant during recreational diving courses and even take on independent roles, such as leading snorkeling excursions as a Snorkeling Instructor)
- Technical diving basics to enhance your knowledge of decompression diving
- Marketing and career skills to help you succeed as a professional diver
How Long Does It Take?
If your previous courses were conducted properly and you learned everything you were supposed to, the Divemaster course can feel more like a formalization of your skills. As long as you’re comfortable communicating with people and thinking logically, the course can take 2–4 weeks to complete, involving 20–40 training dives.
Can You Go from Zero to Divemaster in 2 Months?
Yes, absolutely—if your dives are training-focused and you’re practicing with an experienced instructor who provides feedback. In 2 months and 60–80 training dives, you can become a competent Divemaster ready to guide other divers safely.
I guarantee that if you do it with a well-organized, knowledgeable instructor who is passionate and dedicated, you’ll enjoy every single minute of your journey and learn more than enough to become a good, competent, and successful dive professional.
Final Thoughts
It’s not the number of dives that matters but their quality. Choose your instructor and dive center wisely, focus on structured training, and remember: it’s all about how you learn, not how many times you dive.
See you underwater!