What course should I take next?

This is the question I get more than almost any other, and my answer probably isn't the one you're expecting. Before I tell you what to take, let me tell you how I actually think about courses — because once you see it my way, the "what next" mostly answers itself.

Start with an uncomfortable fact: the first diver was never certified. Neither was the first surgeon — he probably had a hacksaw and a lot of nerve. The activity always comes before the credential. Diving existed long before any agency printed a card, which means the card was never the thing that made diving possible, or legitimate — which tells you what a certification actually is, and what it isn't.

Here's what it isn't: a license that someone enforces. There are no diving police. Nobody is going to swim up to you at depth and ask to see your card. This is a self-regulated industry, and the whole point of that regulation is one thing — safety. You are free to ignore all of it.

And you genuinely can. I tell my students this plainly: you can do anything you want once. You can jump out of an airplane without a parachute — it's entirely possible. The problem is the second time; the odds of getting one are poor. The whole game in diving isn't "can I do this," it's "can I do this safely, again and again, with confidence." Anyone can survive a dive. The skill is surviving all of them.

So what is a course? It's the recorded mistakes. Exactly like medicine: what we teach is the distilled record of what went wrong for the people who came before — often the kind of wrong that doesn't grant a second attempt. A course is a shortcut through other people's hard, sometimes fatal, lessons, so you don't have to find them yourself.

Which brings me to the thing students most often get backwards: certification is not qualification. Your driver's license lets you drive. It does not mean you can take a car around Le Mans or the Daytona 500. The card says you met a minimum standard, once. It says nothing about whether you're competent for this dive, at this depth, in these conditions. Competence is a separate thing, and you earn it in the water, not on paper.

Now the question everyone actually wants answered: can you learn the good habits yourself? Yes. Absolutely. There is no shortage of good information out there. A few sources I follow, to name only a handful:

• DIVE TALK — two very experienced, cross-agency divers talking honestly about real diving.
• Scuba Diver Magazine.
• Sidemount Scuba Diving.
• Divers Alert Network, DAN's own channel and the safety authority I'd point you to first anyway.
• The Human Diver — Gareth Lock's work on human factors and decision-making in diving; I took his complete course and recommend it highly.

You don't need me, or any agency, to reach the knowledge.

But there are two catches, and they're the whole reason courses still exist.

The first is time. How long are you willing to spend on trial and error? You can rent a tank and a set of gear and just keep going down — nobody will stop you. But how much air are you using? What is depth actually doing to you? What's a safety stop, and how do you handle a longer one? There's a lot to work out, and yes, you can work it all out alone — slowly, the expensive way.

The second catch is sharper: good habits are far easier to learn than bad habits are to forget. The skills worth getting right from day one — buoyancy above all, then your kicks, then navigation — are exactly the ones you can't teach yourself, because you can't see yourself. You can read every word ever written about trim and still not notice your own fins stirring up silt. An outside eye that catches the bad habit before it sets is the one thing a video can't give you.

And a few things you can't trial-and-error at all, because the practice scenario is the emergency. You don't rehearse an out-of-air ascent or a panicking buddy by yourself in open water — the first failure is the test. That's where "you can do anything once" stops being a phrase and turns literal.

And forget the agency war — divers love to fight it, and it's a waste of breath. I'm a PADI instructor. I've also trained with SSI, GUE, and TDI. The last course I took was sidemount, with a TDI instructor — and I picked TDI for exactly one reason: I was at a location, I watched the man teach, and I decided I wanted to learn it from him. The agency had nothing to do with it. Underwater, your certification is irrelevant and so is your agency. The water doesn't care whose logo is on your card, and neither does your body — your physiology is the same no matter who trained you. Every legitimate agency teaches you to dive correctly; they just differ in procedure. When something goes wrong at depth, you won't be reaching for your certificate to get out of it — you'll be reaching for your experience. So don't pick a tribe. Learn to dive, and learn it from people who genuinely know how. That is, and always has been, the easiest way to learn it the right way.

So here's what I'd actually do, if I were you and just out of Open Water. I'd take Advanced Open Water right away — not someday, immediately. Here's why. In Open Water training you're brand new: you're watching your own dive the whole time, fighting your gear, minding every breath. You're surviving the dive, not building form. AOW changes that by task-loading you — now you have a job to do, so the diving itself starts running on autopilot underneath you. When you're working a navigation pattern, you're not just diving; you're diving and learning something on top of it. Same with the rest of them — search and recovery, deep diving, and so on. In the PADI system that's two days and five dives across these "adventures," and you come out the far side genuinely comfortable with your gear and with being underwater.

Alongside AOW, I'd add Enriched Air Nitrox. It's a short course — mostly classroom, plus learning to analyze your own tank — and one of the more useful cards you can carry. It won't take you deeper, and it isn't "more air"; what it buys you is longer no-stop bottom time at the depths you already dive, and often a little less fatigue afterward. The physics behind it — partial pressures, and where the depth limits come from — is what my Dalton's law tool lays out, if you're curious. Whether it's worth it for the kind of diving you do is exactly the sort of thing to take to your instructor — so ask them.

After that, I'd point you at Rescue Diver. Up to then, every class has had you focused inward — on yourself, and on your buddy. Rescue turns you outward: now you're responsible for helping others. I've watched it happen again and again — divers finish that course noticeably more confident and more at ease in the water than they went in. It does something the earlier courses can't.

By then you're a different diver. And what comes next? Whatever you decide is the gap you want to close. Every course I've ever taken, I took because I felt I lacked a skill — and then I went and found someone who could teach it to me. That's the whole method: not a ladder you're supposed to climb, but a set of tools you reach for once you know what you're missing.

You don't have to take any of it — no scuba police, remember. But before any dive, certified or not, these are the questions I'd want you answering honestly: Is this a good idea? Is it safe? Am I equipped for what could go wrong? What's my plan B? Talk to your local shop, talk to an instructor you trust, and answer those.

And here's the most important skill in diving — one you won't find on any course card: knowing when not to dive. What actually hurts divers usually isn't the gear or the physics; it's the human factors — stress, ego, the pressure not to be the one who backs out, the quiet urge to push on when something already feels off. All the certification and experience in the world won't help you if you override your own discomfort because everyone else is already gearing up.

So hold on to this: on every single dive, you have one option that is never off the table — not to do it. If you're not comfortable, you call it. You owe no one an explanation. When I dive with a group, we live by one rule: anyone, for any reason, can call off a dive. Nobody questions it. Nobody is made to feel small for it. The ocean isn't going anywhere — there is always tomorrow.

Because in the end, no instructor, no agency, and no card is responsible for your safety. You are. That's not a burden — it's the whole point. Own it.