37% felt unprepared after class — that's the course, not you

If you walked out of your open water class feeling like you weren’t quite ready to dive on your own — you are not alone, you didn’t flunk some unspoken bar. The course wasn’t designed get you ready.

The Business of Diving Institute ran a survey with InDepth Magazine back in 2023 — published March 1, 2025, which is why you’ll see it cited as a 2025 study — and asked 407 divers how ready they felt to dive with a buddy at the end of their certification course. 37.1% said not ready or very much not ready. Only 50.3% said ready or very ready. The rest sat on neutral.

And here’s the part the survey authors flag themselves: their respondent pool skews experienced. 42% of the people who filled it out were instructors (frankly these are the people who the survey mostly ends up targetting). The number is almost certainly worse out in the actual new-diver population, because the least-committed divers — the ones most likely to have been rushed through — aren’t filling out dive-industry surveys.

So when you finished your class feeling uprepared, you weren’t an outlier. You were the like most people.

The structure, briefly

PADI Open Water. SSI Open Water. NAUI. SDI. All of them meet ISO 24801-2, the international standard for autonomous diver. The floor is the same for all of them: four open water dives, max depth 60 feet, can be legitimately completed in a long weekend if you do the eLearning ahead of time.

Four dives. That’s the minimum to walk out with a card. Nobody is lying to you when they sell you the weekend cert — they’re operating to the standard.

But the standard is a floor, not a finish line. The card means you demonstrated the skills under instructor eyes. It does not mean you mastered them.

The survey backs this up. The top three things divers were still wrestling with at the end of class:

• Buoyancy and proper weighting — 61.8%
• Hovering without touching the bottom — 53.0%
• Trim, swimming horizontally — 51.2%

Those are all the same skill, right? Buoyancy is the whole game underwater, and four dives is not enough time to actually own it. But it’s also getting to the level where you feel comfortable. When our bouyancy isn’t right we are not comfortable, not enjoying ourselves

Asked what would have helped, 70.7% of respondents said the same thing: more dives. Not a different agency. Not a different curriculum. Time in the water. That’s it TIME IN THE WATER - we need to get some more time diving and with repetition comes comfort.

The menu the shop usually doesn’t volunteer

If you’re feeling shaky, here’s the menu — none of it requires you to buy another certification card:

• Pool drop-in sessions. A lot of shops run open pool time for $20-30. Show up with your mask and fins, rent a tank, run weight checks and hovering drills for an hour, leave. Highest value per dollar in this whole list. Pool time really is great to get a better feeling for the skill like bouyancy, with almost no risk - you can just play around
• A more-experienced buddy who’s been diving recently. Ask them to watch your weighting and your trim on the first couple of dives. A good buddy tells you what they see.
• YouTube on the fundamentals. Mask clear, regulator recovery, weight check, buoyancy. Watch the same skill explained by three different people. It clicks differently when you hear it three ways.
• A guided shore dive with a divemaster — not a refresher course, just a guided dive with someone watching. Cheaper than a course, more useful than going solo when you’re not sure. Getting out and diving with someone else is a great opportunity to practice.

A formal refresher course is also on the menu. Sometimes it’s the right call — especially if you want focused instructor eyes for an afternoon. It’s just not the only answer, and it’s not a prerequisite.

The gap is structural. The fix is time in the water — and time is cheaper than the industry usually implies.