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Instructor internship

Team-teach PADI courses alongside our experienced instructors, and certify divers you'll be proud to say you trained.

Not an instructor yet?

We teach the PADI Instructor Development Course together with a partner dive centre nearby. See how to get there

Hand signals on an Open Water course

Overview

Through their background or education, some volunteers can contribute in a spectacular fashion. Volunteers with special skills, whether marine biologists or scuba instructors, are always in high demand and most welcome to intern with us. This page covers the options for PADI instructors who want to intern with us, build experience and teach diving to fellow volunteers.

The internship is for instructors who have little or no experience, or who are a little rusty, and want to build experience by team-teaching with our more experienced instructors. If you've been teaching for years and are set in your ways, our science and conservation volunteering is likely the better fit.

The minimum stay is six weeks. You'll of course get the certification credit for the students you teach, even when you team-teach.

The internship at a glance

Length
Six weeks minimum, typically 6 to 12 weeks
Fees
550 USD a week for the first six weeks275 USD a week from week seven
Longer stays
PADI Tec 40, 45 and 50 courses free at 16, 20 and 24 weeks
Former volunteers
20% off the weekly fee
Included
Accommodation, three meals a day, all diving including gear, marine park fees and transport, airport pickup and Wi-Fi. Also any PADI course you take, except the manual and the PADI certification fee.
Start dates
Every other Monday. We take one instructor intern at a time, so get in touch early.

If you're a certified instructor

Role model divers

We expect our instructors to be role models as divers. If you don't have proper buoyancy control or trim, or if you kick up the bottom when you dive, let's please work on fixing that before you teach any volunteers. If you feel your own advanced dive skills need some work, please realise this is not unusual, considering how easy it is and how few dives it takes to become a PADI instructor. We're happy to help you improve!

Equipment

Some volunteers arrive with their own scuba gear, but if they don't, they'll dive in a DIR-style backplate and wing setup (do google it if you're unfamiliar with it, or watch this video of how it's assembled). We've chosen this setup because we feel it's superior to normal recreational BCDs, and as our volunteers stay for a minimum of six weeks, it's no problem having to adjust the webbing to get it right for the first dive or two.

If you're not familiar with this sort of setup, that's no problem either. You can keep diving with your own BCD or switch to one of our wings. It's entirely up to you. Despite the wing being DIR style, volunteers dive with normal regulators, not a Hogarthian long hose setup. We also use dive computers.

Teaching standards

We take our time to teach to a very high standard. If you've already been working as an instructor, you've probably felt pressured at times to certify divers who only just meet the standards, who perhaps aren't truly competent, or aren't really prepared to dive independently after the Open Water course, even if they "passed the course".

In a commercial dive shop it can be difficult to take students on extra dives for free. But we're anything but a busy dive shop, and divers with poor buoyancy and skills can't do the scientific work we need to do underwater, so we have to teach scuba courses the best way. This is a luxury to embrace! Imagine having no time constraints as an instructor, and being able to teach the best divers ever. We promise you'll be proud to say you taught and certified the divers you trained here.

Courses taught

Most of our volunteers are already scuba divers when they arrive, so we don't teach that many Open Water courses. Many, probably more than half, take advantage of our unique offer of free scuba training, so they may do the EFR, Advanced or Rescue course. These three make up about half of all our courses. The rest are Divemaster courses, specialties, technical diving and the occasional Open Water course.

Not yet a certified instructor?

Once you've completed your Divemaster course, the next step on the professional scuba ladder is becoming a PADI instructor. If that feels like too big a step, PADI also offers an intermediate Assistant Instructor certification, which gives you added experience teaching students in a limited number of specialty areas. It isn't a prerequisite for instructor training, though.

Marine Conservation Philippines is a working scientific marine conservation organisation, not an instructor development centre, but we have some very experienced instructors who help teach the instructor course. We do it in partnership with a nearby dive centre, so we can use their excellent pool with an air-conditioned classroom next to it, and the teachers on your instructor course come from both Marine Conservation Philippines and the dive centre. You can read much more about the PADI instructor course and the partnership here. The IDC is a fairly short course, around fifteen days, and you'll typically rejoin us once it's done.

Becoming an instructor

Let us be clear: the PADI instructor course will not teach you how to dive! You should already have excellent water skills and diving knowledge from your divemaster training. The Instructor Development Course (IDC) is all about learning how to teach those skills and academics to new divers, or to divers continuing their dive education. It consists of mock training scenarios in the classroom, pool training and open water sessions, where you practise teaching techniques and learn about instructional methodology and the business of diving. The course has two parts, the Assistant Instructor course (AI) and the Open Water Scuba Instructor course (OWSI), which together make up the entire IDC. You need to complete both before attending the PADI Instructor Examination (IE).

An instructor and a student going through their scuba kit together before a training dive
Going through the kit before a training dive

To start the IDC, you need

Just want to do your IDC?

If you're only interested in the IDC itself, and not in an internship with us before or after it, we can still help, and the money you pay will still work for marine conservation. In that case, we'll sort your accommodation outside MCP to keep things simple for you.

Read about the instructor course

One way to plan a long stay

Here's an example of how a long internship could be structured, from your first courses with us to teaching as an instructor. There are too many ways to do it to show every option, so please get in touch and we'll plan yours together.

  1. 1

    Advanced and Rescue

    The preceding courses, while you build dive experience. Typically 2 to 4 weeks.

  2. 2

    Divemaster course

    8 weeks if you're already Rescue certified.

  3. 3

    Instructor course (IDC)

    A week of preparation, then the IDC itself. About 3 weeks.

  4. 4

    Instructor internship

    Six weeks minimum, typically 6 to 12 weeks.

  5. 5

    Optional: tec diver training

    Length to be discussed.

Interested in interning?

Tell us about your diving and teaching so far, and when you'd like to join us. We'll get back to you with available dates.

Apply now