Why standards

Recreational scuba diving has developed in the last two decades to be a very popular leisure time activity. The recreational scuba diver of today is typically a vacation diver who uses leisure industry services, like travel agents specialised on diving trips, diving schools and dive centres, throughout the world. Given the variety of different training service providers on the market, it is no easy task for consumers to choose the right training service provider.

Experts from scuba diving training organisations and companies, consumer representatives and authorities have jointly developed standards for training services in recreational scuba diving which equally serve both the recreational diver and scuba diving professionals. The result of this common effort is a series European Standards on published in 2004 by the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) dealing with quality and safety aspects in the training recreational scuba divers and scuba instructors as well as requirements for dive centres.

The European Standards specify three levels of recreational scuba diver certification, and two levels of scuba instructor certification. Each standard specifies the competencies that a scuba diver or a scuba instructor has to have achieved in order for a training organization to award the respective certification. For each level the standards lay down requirements concerning prerequisites for training, theoretical knowledge, scuba skills and certification procedures.