Instructor Development Course Blog

Jake’s IDC blog

The one person you always tend to remember is your instructor. Their enthusiasm and passion for the underwater world is probably what made you the diver you are today. My own passion and enthusiasm pushed me into becoming an instructor, so here I was at 0800 on a Monday morning at my Instructor Development Course (IDC), the most nervous I’d been in a long time almost feeling sick, we were introduced to our course director, Des Paroz, who took us inside to our classroom. Des instantly strived to make us feel at ease and assure us that everything we were about to learn was well within our capability. After attempting to put us at ease we dived straight into some instructor theory.

The next 10 days were filled with classroom work and diving, during these days we learnt what it is to be an instructor, what it takes and how to be successful. Everything we had ever learnt about diving and more was wrapped up in these 10 days. It was hard work but it was tonnes of fun, luckily our IDC was only one week before the Instructor Examinations (IE) down in Sydney so everything we had learnt was fresh in our head, however this did nothing to comfort my nerves! At the end of our IDC Des congratulated us and assured us the IE has no surprises and that we had done it all before.

One week later I found myself down in Sydney staying in a hostel in Manly, the drive down was probably the most nervous I have ever been in my life. Me and Kimberly went down together to do our IE and I’m sure if someone had sat in that car with us they could probably have felt the nerves coming from us. We tried to study on the drive down, bouncing physics and physiology questions off each other for as long as we could bear, but by the time we got to Sydney it was all we could do to not

throw up!

The whole 3 days of the IE feels like a blur now. I think the worst part was waiting on shelly beach after doing our Open Water Presentations and Rescue’s to be told whether we had passed or not. I was number 6, so the very last person. Everybody before me came back with HUGE (and well deserved) grins on there face, there were hugs and laughs for everyone when they came back, then Alex (our Instructor Examiner) called me over and sat me down. I remembe

r after about 10 seconds of looking over paper work, which felt like 10 hours! He looked up and said ‘Well done Jake’ and shook my hand. No words had ever sounded so sweet! All the pressure of the past few days re

leased itself in a sigh of relief as he went on to analyse my presentation and rescue (although as soon as he said ‘Well done’ I was in a bit of a daze of surprise), I walked back to the group with a huge grin on my face, we’d all passed, all the pressure was off and we were finally Instructors.

A couple of months later and I’m working as an Instructor for Let’s Go Adventures, the work is pretty demanding, but rewarding, se

eing people overcome the panic and fear of being underwater and watch them taking their first breaths underwater is fantastic, if your thinking of becoming a dive professional there isn’t much that can compare, it’s amazing being able to say ‘I’m a PADI Instructor’. I’d recommend it to anyone who loves diving and wants to share it with others!