My experience will obviously be a little different having trained in Australasia rather than the US, so I'm not sure if the same applies to you guys. One thing that bugged me with dive school was that the schools spend a lot of time filing the students heads with dreams and ambitions of getting offshore in order to sell them on the full ADAS I, II & III courses, plus DMT and supervisor in some cases. This is all very well if you end up offshore, but as far as I know something like 2/3 of dive school graduates don't last two years in the industry, and of those that do only a majority make it offshore with the majority doing civils or aquaculture work, yet the schools are still happy to take their cash, knowing that 90% of them will be disappointed. I ended up only doing parts I & II due to money constraints, and I'm constantly working with guys who did extra training with the intention of getting offshore but who've so far had zero benefit from the thousands of extra $$ spent. I'm planning on heading back in a year or so to do part III and then have a crack at getting offshore eventually, but I'm glad that I chose to defer that get a few years of civils experience first.
I also agree with the idea of some sort of apprenticeship system- this was discussed with some workmates a while ago, our idea was that divers below a certain experience level "apprentices" should be paid less, but that there should be a minimum number of experienced "tradesman" divers required on a team working with them. Our other observation was that it was often the lowest paid, most entry-level work that seemed to be the most dangerous due to the often inexperienced personnel employed being willing to submit to work conditions that the more experienced would never stand for.
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