Advanced
The next step after Open Water. Five dives in total: two required (deep diving and underwater navigation) plus three elective specialty dives picked from a wide menu. By the end you can dive to 30 metres and have a head start toward up to three PADI specialty certifications.
Advanced
A subset of the Advanced Open Water Diver course. Complete three Adventure Dives from the same menu and you earn the Adventure Diver rating. Three dives, not five. Useful if you want a structured next step after Open Water without committing to the full AOW programme yet.
Advanced
The course that shifts your attention outward. Up to here, training is about your own diving. From this point on it's about everyone else's too. You learn to spot problems early, prevent them where you can, and respond when they happen anyway.
Beginner
A try-it scuba experience. No certification, no exam, no commitment to a full course. A PADI professional puts you in scuba gear in a pool or calm shallow water, talks you through the basics, and stays with you the whole time so you can find out what breathing underwater actually feels like.
Beginner
The first scuba certification, and the most widely recognised one in the world. It makes you a fully certified diver, able to plan and run dives with a buddy, hire equipment, and join trips anywhere — with no professional supervision required.
Beginner
A shorter version of the Open Water Diver course. You can dive to 12 metres, but always under the supervision of a PADI professional rather than just with a buddy. Useful if you're short on time, expect to dive on holidays with a guide, or want a stepping stone toward the full Open Water certification.
Children
A first taste of scuba for children aged 8 and older. They breathe underwater for the first time in shallow water, no deeper than 2 metres, with a PADI professional alongside the whole time. No exam. No certification at the end. It's a try-it experience, not a course.
Children
A scuba programme for children aged 8 and older. Sessions happen in a pool. Kids work through a sequence of AquaMissions that cover both core scuba skills and themed challenges like wreck diving, navigation, and underwater photography. Parental consent is required.
Instructor Development
The first half of the PADI Instructor Development Course (IDC). On its own, it earns you a PADI Assistant Instructor rating, useful for assisting with student training. Most candidates continue straight into the second half (OWSI) and the Instructor Examination to qualify as a full PADI Instructor.
Instructor Development
A professional milestone rather than a single course. The Master Scuba Diver Trainer (MSDT) rating is earned by PADI Instructors who have certified at least 25 PADI divers and hold five or more PADI Specialty Instructor certifications. It signals that you teach a wide range of courses and have real student-throughput behind you.
Instructor Development
The second half of the Instructor Development Course (IDC) and the path to a full PADI Instructor rating. The OWSI programme follows the Assistant Instructor section. Most candidates take both back-to-back, then attend the Instructor Examination (IE) at the end to earn the certification.
Instructor Development
The qualification that lets a PADI Instructor teach a specific Specialty Diver course. Each specialty is its own certification, so an instructor builds them one at a time. PADI lists 25-plus standard specialties, plus distinctive ones registered by individual Course Directors.
Professional
The first PADI professional rating. It qualifies you to lead certified divers underwater, assist instructors during training, run dive briefings, and conduct PADI Reactivate refreshers. From here, the next step is the Open Water Scuba Instructor program.
Refresher
A refresher programme for certified divers who have been out of the water for a while. Two parts: an online knowledge review and an in-water session with a dive professional. The online portion takes a few hours. The water work usually runs half a day, depending on how rusty you are.
Specialty
The recreational specialty for diving below 18 metres, down to the 40-metre recreational limit. It covers gas planning, narcosis, and the buddy and safety procedures that change at depth.
Specialty
A short specialty course that gets you past the common beginner mistakes of underwater photography. Camera handling, strobe use, backscatter avoidance, colour correction. The course works with whatever underwater camera you bring, from compact point-and-shoots up to housed mirrorless and DSLR rigs.
Specialty
A citizen-science specialty. You learn how to survey, collect, identify and report marine debris during a dive, and how to contribute the data to PADI AWARE Foundation's global database. Two to four hours of eLearning plus one supervised survey dive. The collected data feeds real conservation reporting, not just a feel-good gesture.
Specialty
A specialty for diving in currents. You let the water do the work and cover more ground with less effort. The course covers how to plan a drift, how to stay together as a group, what surface signalling looks like, and what to do when the current strengthens or weakens unexpectedly mid-dive.
Specialty
A first aid and CPR course focused on infants (under 1) and children (1 to puberty). Covers the specific techniques and adjustments needed when the patient is small: gentler chest compressions, smaller breaths, choking response, and the most common childhood injuries and illnesses. No diving prerequisite. Open to anyone who wants the training.
Specialty
A focused course on cardiac arrest response. Covers CPR (both traditional and hands-only) and Automated External Defibrillator (AED) use. Short, practical, and open to anyone. Note: this course on its own does not meet the first aid / CPR requirement for PADI Rescue Diver or Divemaster — for those, take EFR Primary & Secondary Care instead.
Specialty
The specialty that lets you dive with nitrox: enriched-air mixes containing more oxygen and less nitrogen than ordinary air. Less nitrogen absorbed means longer no-decompression limits at depth and shorter required surface intervals. It's PADI's most popular specialty and is often done in a single day.
Specialty
The specialty that opens dive sites to a second life. Sites look different at night. Day species retreat, nocturnal species emerge. You learn how to dive in low visibility with artificial light, how to navigate when familiar landmarks disappear, and how to use a dive light for buddy communication.
Specialty
A conservation-focused specialty open to anyone, certified diver or not. The course covers the main threats to ocean health, what individual divers can do about them, and how PADI AWARE Foundation's programmes work. Includes eLearning only — no in-water training required. A portion of the course fee goes directly to AWARE conservation work.
Specialty
The specialty that sharpens the single most important skill in diving. Good buoyancy control lets you hover without effort, use less air, descend and ascend smoothly, and observe marine life without disturbing the reef. The course rebuilds the basics taught in Open Water, then drills them until they become automatic.
Specialty
A specialty designed for divers who want to work alongside local authorities — fire and rescue, police search teams, coastguard volunteers — or who already do that work and want a structured underwater curriculum. Discipline is public safety, not recreational. Focus is on scenario practice in real conditions.
Specialty
A specialty for finding lost objects underwater and bringing them safely to the surface. The course covers four standard search patterns, lift bag handling, and the planning that turns a hopeful look-around into a structured operation. Useful for recovering personal property, dropped equipment, or evidence with a recognised method.
Specialty
The recreational specialty for diving on wrecks. Ships, planes, vehicles — purpose-sunk artificial reefs or accidental losses. Course covers surveying, line and reel use, and the specific hazards a wreck adds to a normal dive (entanglement, sharp metal, silt-outs, restricted access). No actual penetration past safe limits.
Technical
A try-it experience for technical diving. Short, confined-water session with a PADI Tec Instructor. You wear the full technical configuration (doubles or sidemount, redundant regulators, stage cylinders), take it through a few basic skills, and find out what tec diving actually involves before committing to a longer course.
Technical
The course that teaches sidemount cylinder configuration for technical diving. Cylinders ride on the diver's hips rather than on the back. The configuration suits caves, wrecks, restricted spaces, and divers who prefer back relief over a heavy double rig. The certification credits across other PADI TecRec courses.
Technical
The deep end of the PADI TecRec ladder. Trimix replaces some nitrogen in the breathing mix with helium, which reduces narcosis and oxygen toxicity risk at extreme depths. The course qualifies you to dive to 90 metres / 300 feet using trimix, with multigas decompression and up to four stage or deco cylinders.