Are you interested in a diving career?
The first thing to understand when considering a career in the diving industry is that there is no ‘diving industry’ as such. In reality, the occupational diving industry is made up of many diving industry sectors, the common factor being that each one of them employs divers to undertake some sort of work underwater. (See All Careers for detail on the various diving sectors).
Next, you need to accept that an occupational diver gets paid for working in the water – not for diving (this is merely the means of getting there). This means, of course, that you have to be able to do the work that you’re being paid for.
Common to all these sectors, though, is that every successful diver needs to have more than just technical skills – their attitude and approach to the job are just as important.
Being a professional diver sounds glamorous and has a lot of emotional appeal, but the reality is that like any other job, it has its good points and bad points. The money can be good, but as a new diver it can be hard to get into the industry.
The job offers a lot of freedom. It is mostly contract work on a job-by-job basis and most divers only work about half the year. Contract work of course offers little job security but this industry offers lots of travel to exotic locations and getting paid good money. Of course, that can be offset by having to live for extended periods of time on an isolated platform in confined quarters.
The work environment for a construction diver is often difficult, demanding, and dangerous. The diver may be required to reside on a ship or away from home for periods of days to weeks. During this time, it is quite common to work long shifts without a day off.
Whichever way you look at it – nothing in life is free. You need to start your diving career with realistic expectations. Take what ever opportunities you can to get started, no matter how lowly it might be. Aquaculture diving for example can be a good place to start. The work is pretty much all manual and very repetitive, but you clock up lots of hours and it’s an opportunity to start getting your CV/resume together, to commence building up the necessary competence and experience base and earn some money at the same time.
Whatever you do – get the word out that you are available and keep getting it out until you get hired.
Don’t get discouraged – the diving contractor that says they have no work today may very well have some tomorrow. The company that you called yesterday looking for work may have the work today. Keep in touch and let them know you are available – it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the attention!
The other thing to remember is the diving industry is not just about diving. Your diving experience can offer you a transition to related industries. Occupational divers often migrate to specialised roles in support areas such as dive supervision, life support, remotely operated vehicle and atmospheric diving suit piloting. Occupational divers abound in the clinical hyperbaric treatment facilities of hospitals and even in pressurised tunnelling. Those with good mechanical, hydraulic or electronic skills will be headhunted for the hard to fill equipment tech positions. If you get sick of being tired, wet and miserable, or your wife is tired of not having seen you for months, then there are other career choices available to you.
What skills do you need?
What sort of skills you need to be an occupational diver depends on the particular occupational diving sector you are working in. In general, any sector that involves underwater construction work requires pretty much a common set of basic skills (see below). These may be overlaid with some specific diving equipment and techniques particular to the type of environment the work is being undertaken in Occupational diving that is not construction–based requires a far more specialised and differentiated set of skills – ranging from marine biology degrees for Scientific Divers through explosive ordinance disposal and salvage skills for military divers and highly developed search and recovery techniques for police divers. In the middle there somewhere are divers in the aquaculture industries, some of whom do lots of harvesting and net cleaning and light manual work and others who spend there time harvesting.
Most people, though, when they are considering a career as an occupational diver, are thinking about a construction diver – either working offshore in the oil and gas industry or onshore on dams, reservoirs or bridges.
Construction Diving
As a construction diver, you are expected to be able to perform a number of different tasks. Much of your work involves construction and inspection. You examine vessels, docks, piers, pipelines, and other structures in order to assess their condition. In some cases, test sampling and underwater photography, both still and video, may be used to assess a particular situation. Plans are drawn up from the assessment and you are assigned specific tasks to carry out in conjunction with other members of the dive team. You may be required to undertake non destructive testing of structural components.
Your construction duties may involve the use of hand and power tools, compressed air, and pneumatic equipment. Welding, burning, and drilling are a few of the tasks that you may carry out during your dives and you may be required to use using cranes, winches, cables, derricks or lift bags to raise or assist in moving objects. You may be required to use High Pressure blasters or power scrubbers to clean structural surfaces, and water dredges and water jets in uncovering buried components.
Mechanical ability is a must since you are expected to carry out a wide variety of tasks often with machinery.
All in all, ability and experience are the keys to making a successful career out of diving. Diving certification alone does not qualify you for underwater construction. You have to dedicate yourself to learning in this profession as you will be continuously challenged to adapt to new environments and to acquire skills with new equipment.
For a start, there’s what you might call the basic tool kit.
To be accepted onto an ADAS course you need to have demonstrated that you can dive and are comfortable in the water (i.e. that you actually are suited to diving) by gaining a basic recreational dive qualification and completing at least 10 post-course dives.
This is actually is a small but very worthwhile investment to make before you commit yourself to spend quite a lot of money on occupational diver training.
You can bet your sweet bippy that if you don’t enjoy the recreational diving experience, you certainly won’t enjoy being cold, wet and miserable after struggling for hours with some heavy and bloody-minded piece of equipment when you can’t see the hand at the end of your arm and you’re hanging out in the current like a flag!
Then, as well as your recreational dive card, every diver needs to have:
- good health, no contra-indicated medical conditions and an occupational dive medical certificate (see Medical Fitness)
- good swimming ability and be comfortable and at home in the water
- stamina and physical fitness
- the ability to work under stressful conditions
- good levels of concentration under demanding physical conditions
- the ability to function in zero or low visibility conditions (if you don’t like confined spaces or dark rooms – you won’t like working as a diver!).
On top of that, every successful diver needs to have:
A good attitude
- Occupational diving is not one of those jobs that’s just about showing up. Just as in the rest of life, success as a working diver means being keen and enthusiastic, positive, energetic with a ‘can do’ attitude’ and a willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done. Might sound like a motherhood statement, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true!
- The projects you may be working on, such as repairing underwater structures, pipelines or cable anchors will be gruelling, tedious work. Discipline and work ethic are extremely important.
The ability to follow strict safety procedures
- Occupational diving is a high risk industry where the risk is controlled to within very acceptable limits by a continuing commitment to strict safety procedures in every aspects of diving – equipment selection, maintenance, mobilisation, briefing, deployment underwater, undertaking the job itself and post-diving and de-mobilisation.
The ability to work both as part of a team and alone
- Working as a diver involves a number of rather unique requirements. Most importantly, a basic requirement is to be able to work successfully as a part of the team that has to work together to get the job set up and pulled down and often has to live together for long periods in confined environments. And then, on most diving jobs, you need to be able to be comfortable working on your own in the water actually doing the job – a long way from the surface and with only limited communication with the topside crew. A successful diver needs to be able to function well in both these modes because that’s how the jobs work.
Common sense, the ability to problem solve is and a practical ability to work with his/her hands
- Occupational diving is about working underwater – it often involves quite a lot of manual work. It certainly almost always involves working with machinery (topsides and underwater), equipment and tools. Machinery and equipment break down or needs modifying – you need to have mechanical aptitude, be able to find out what’s wrong, undertake basic maintenance and be comfortable using tools and getting your hands dirty.
The ability and the willingness to learn and to continue to learn throughout your career
- The first thing you have to do is go to a reputable dive school, learn how to become a competent occupational diver and learn the basic skills. You won’t even get a foot in the door without that.
- This involves getting a basic First Aid qualification at which you need to requalify every 3 years (every 12 months for the and CPR and Oxygen resuscitation components)
- Unless you’re a specialist diver with the need for a very specific skill set (say underwater archaeologist or marine biologist), the more skills you have the better chance of getting work. Not only is technology changing, but multi-skilling is the name of the game. Employers are generally more likely to re-hire someone who can turn his or her hand to a variety of useful things than the one-hit wonder.
- Additionally, in this day of duty of care and increasing litigation, increasingly employers and regulators are demanding that certified personnel demonstrate continued proficiency – that they demonstrate at regular intervals (often 5 yearly) that the certificate holder is still competent at the functions he/she was certified to undertake. (CSWIP Non Destructive Testing and Diver Medical Technician, Offshore Survival and Helicopter Underwater Escape Training certificates for example).
Then there’s the real nitty gritty stuff
In essence, occupational diving is about working for an employer or contractor who wants to get the job done and make a buck doing it. If it’s a big job, every delay can result in the client is losing lots of money. In any case, the quicker you finish the job, the sooner you can start the next one. Time is money and if you can’t get the job done with a minimum of delay, you certainly won’t be popular and you may not be invited back (and may even be asked be to leave!)
Now, the reality is that there are very few people that can walk off the street, do their dive course and be ready to start working effectively as a construction or any other sort of working diver.
There is a learning phase for everyone, but the more skills you have – particularly of the practical, hands-on type – the more immediate value you will have for an employer, the more employable you will be and the better your chances that you will continue to find work and make a good living.
In particular, there are some fundamental skills that are pretty much essential to working as a diver. These include:
Rigging and dogging
- Every diver needs at least basic rigging skills and to be able to work with fibre and wire ropes and chain. The ability to tie knots and lashings, whip and splice are essential skills, as is using hard and soft slings, chain blocks, tuggers, come-alongs, tirfors, hoists, derricks.
- The basic essentials of rigging will be taught on your ADAS Occupational dive course, but a rigger’s licence is a legal requirement in many areas as is that of a dogman (slinging loads and directing cranes) and having the licences is well worthwhile.
Welding
Although quality welding underwater is quite difficult, with wet welding training you can undertake basic tasks such as ship hull repair, underwater maintenance or anode replacement.
- Although basic dry and wet welding techniques are taught on an ADAS Part 2 (construction diving) course, the reality is that you need a lot more practice to become a proficient welder than you can get during your course. The more welding experience you get the better a welder you will be, and dry land welding is a pretty basic and very useful skill to have as a construction diver.
- Being a good welder enables you to repair or modify gear, fix equipment to steel decks and generally be very practical and useful on the dive site and in during mob and de-mob operations
Cutting and burning
- Divers do far more cutting (or burning) underwater than welding as it is a basic technique for cutting sheet piles, removing tubular supports, trimming damaged plates and removing weld and preparing edges. Underwater cutting is a basic technique which you will be taught on course, but again – becoming really competent takes more time and rods than you will get access to on a diver course.
Diver Medical Technician (DMT)
- All occupational divers are trained and are required to remain current in first aid. However, at one of the members of the dive team who is not diving (other than the supervisor) is required to be trained in advanced first aid – generally referred to as a “diver medic” or “Diver Medical Technician” (DMT).
- The DMT is a person who will be expected to perform a range of advanced diving first aid in an emergency. The DMT might be expected to assist in the initial diagnosis, tend the patient and administer medication and/or fluids to take control of the situation until a Diving Doctor arrives. This is particularly useful when planning diving projects in remote areas.
- Because dive teams don’t carry any passengers, and all personnel rotate through the various topside and diving roles, in effect, all divers are pretty much expected to be qualified and maintain currency as a DMT
Non Destructive Testing (NDT)
- NDT is the detection and evaluation of defects in materials in a process that produces no deleterious effects on the material or structure under test.
- NDT involves paint coating survey, cathodic protection inspection, magnetic particle inspection and underwater video, underwater digital photography and ultrasonics wall thickness.
- The construction industry, with its numerous onshore bridges and structures and its offshore platforms and extensive network of pipelines, is a significant user of NDT technologies. These are necessary to assess the structural integrity of these installations. Underwater testing of welds in pipelines is regularly performed for crack detection using visual, magnetic, electromagnetic, ultrasonic or radiographic techniques.
- NDT is a highly valuable qualification to hold and a great tool in a professional diver’s armoury.
Basic offshore induction and emergency training (BOSIET)
- All personnel working offshore must pass an offshore survival course to gain a basic level of understanding of the hazards encountered when working on offshore installations and the knowledge, skills and confidence to respond appropriately in the event of an emergency whilst offshore. This course incorporates training in offshore facility abandonment and sea survival procedures, helicopter safety and escape, first response to fire incidents and survival at sea in the event of vessel abandonment.
- Visit OPITO’s website (http://www.opito.net/ )for details of approved BOSIET training providers.
Conclusion
A seasoned and experienced occupational diver is a consummate professional; always willing to learn new things & constant in their approach to safe, productive diving operations. It is critical then, that a new diver must develop and sustain an attitude of professionalism in his/her work.
Currently, the oil industry is extremely busy and opportunities abound. These opportunities are preferentially for experienced divers, but that means that those divers are often pulled in from less glamorous onshore jobs. This flow on effect creates opportunities for less experienced divers to start getting the experience they need to get the big bucks.
There are opportunities for divers willing to start small and put in and continue to put in, and if you’re keen, a fabulous career awaits you.