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Permalink Reply by A.. Parnell on April 29, 2011 at 7:15am

Re enlist for Army divers they have a very good reputation in the field and you can carry that with you for the rest of your life and be considered to be a real diver not just another graduate from a dive school diploma paper mill.

You will get paid for attending and get real experience plus you wont have a debt of

$20 to $30 thousand haging over your head when you finish. You may also get a re enlistment bonus. Try not to confuse military diving with civilian diving both have diffrent mission objectives and statements. Both are just jobs and there is always going to need people. Ever wonder why they always need people? Their is good reasons why? Get paid for trainning you will be glad you did. With the diffrence in cash you will have had steady employment and money to pay for a new truck and dive hat the others wont be able to have been so lucky. Good luck in your final decision.

Former Army Airborne & Navy Diver

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Beeson on April 29, 2011 at 9:59am

well i am glad you had some patience with me "DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK" i have read a lot of posts on here about the same question i  learned alot man it seems to me that to many people fall into the trap of CDA and other schools blowing this s*** up saying that this s*** is so easy to get hired on and theres all these options and it seems now like a pipe dream but i can only assume that this like any other blue collar trade you really need to be grandfathered in or have some good damn refrences to get your foot in the door schools dont really mean s*** huh however i am going to figure out a solid plan and still pursue this career i just think i will be taking some different routes so anyone who is reading this post who has the same questions i do READ ALL THE POSTS there are over a hundred pages of discussions with many titled the same thing SHOULD I BE A COMMERCIAL DIVER   thank you guys for tolerating us with our petty questions heh heh but also feel free to input as much as you want to try to at least point us in the right direction for this career dont let us get sucked into the certificate mills thanks! 

 

oh by the way i am a combat engineer in the US ARMY and i deal with explosives nothing would be more thrilling than to take my passion of explosives and using it in a commercial diving career

 

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Permalink Reply by JMayo on April 29, 2011 at 10:05am

Look more into other schools.. CDA will blow smoke up your ass about there being so much work come spend 30k here and might fall into there other outrageous priced courses. Had a friend who got suckered into there deep diving course which runs about 4k extra. Guess what he's still a tender who might not see 150ft till he breaks out! Look into schools overseas like NYD and PDC who are a 1/3 of a the price and IMCA certified.

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Permalink Reply by KMarshall on April 29, 2011 at 10:24am

Andrew,

As always it comes down to the individual. If I were in your boots I would look at  vrhabilis.com and see if that is the kind of thing you may be interested in and if it is get in contact. Cheers, Kirk 

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Permalink Reply by Jeffrey Wilson on May 3, 2011 at 11:00am

I agree with Ace, Check out your options before wasting your time with CDA. plus if you do re-enlist for Army diver you got 13 years left till you retire. why start over and make minimum wage choking hose for 5 years till you break out? plus your married.... Kiss her goodbye if you are lucky to get hired on, you will have the luxury of being deployed to the great GOM and not have a set schedule for the first 3 years... Dive schools are just like recruiters for the military, they will tell you any BS you want to hear, they just want your money. You probably hear them say that there is a exciting new career that will pay lots of money and travel blah blah blah.... You know how many classmates actually stuck with it and is still in the diving industry? 5 out of 30! yeah 5 of us are either diving or choking hose waiting to get that chance to breakout, the other 25 just wasted 20 grand to go back to what they were doing before.

Ace makes another great point, you have the oppurtunity to try out this field for free, might even get a bonus! Who knows you might try it out and realize this is not for you.....

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Permalink Reply by Nick Daly on May 3, 2011 at 1:37pm

My class of 25, I am the only one that made it. All the instructors told me I'd never make it and the military guys would. The last military "master" diver I worked with offshore ran me out of gas at 250 feet because he was telling tenders about some time he got drunk in Hawaii instead of watching the rack. I am not impressed with military divers, they can't even put their hats on by themselves. I was a cook before I became a diver. All you need is perseverence. I had divers throw gravel at us when we were tenders loading the boat, they wake us up in the middle of the night saying we need to get in the water and do a wheel job. We'd do anything to get in the water and we all got up, I was first out there, turned around and told the rest of the tenders we'd been had. So the next day we lined the divers' hardhats with neverseize, fill their boots with water and freeze them. One guy was scared of trigger fish so we threw a live one in his rack while he was sleeping. The war continues....

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Permalink Reply by Simon on May 4, 2011 at 4:25am

The statistics for new divers don't look very good. The success rate seems to be anywhere between 5% and 25% which leaves a lot of people with no work and lots of debt. A school in the UK claims over 80% of students are working but the doctors say less than 25% renew medicals.

 

Hopefully work will pick up and everyone will be in employment.

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