What makes PADI special?
When I reflect on PADI Divers, Members and our global team of employees, I think about our organization’s culture. As a group, we possess a rare ability to blend different personalities, talents and backgrounds to create a highly successful, high-performing culture continuously transformed by an organizational “alchemy.”
I have seen this remarkable team chemistry adapt and renew itself across the decades. PADI employees, PADI Members and PADI Divers are a mix of diverse individual talents that create a spectacular combined result that is greater than the sum of its parts.
This “global diaspora” of PADI has unified into a thriving, innovative environment. PADI Member and Divers worldwide are resilient, with a proven ability to turn adversity into opportunity. Together over the years, we’ve faced many major setbacks and market shifts, yet have transformed each into advantage. Thanks to this PADI network effect, PADI is strong and operates as a global ecosystem.
Six Reasons PADI Is the Largest and Most Successful Diver Organization
1. Being part of the PADI community offers distinct size and impact advantages.
Belonging to something bigger than any of us as individuals is empowering. PADI is a global network of PADI Professionals that has issued 30 million PADI certifications, with hundreds of thousands added each year. These professionals make up the world’s largest and strongest dive professional membership network.
PADI does not directly employ most people who “live the PADI brand”; rather, our culture is an ongoing mix of:
- Independent business owners – 6,600+ privately owned dive centers and resorts operating in vastly different cultures and local economies.
- Individual professionals – 128,000 PADI Instructors, Assistant Instructors and Divemasters with highly diverse personalities, teaching styles and languages.
2. We transform people’s lives for the better, and forever.
Thanks to our “alchemy,” PADI has the unique ability to take widely diverse cultures and people and align them under a standardized diver training and educational safety curriculum. This is why a PADI Instructor in Egypt and another in Japan deliver the same core experience with global applicability yet adapted to culture and local conditions.
At the individual level, PADI culture builds on the concept of transformation – taking everyday people and positively transforming how they interact with the planet and the ocean.
- Overcoming fear: PADI Professionals take people who are novices, teach them to breathe underwater and/or freedive, and transform them into confident explorers.
- Lifestyle shift: PADI culture frequently turns casual tourists into passionate ocean advocates, or into professionals who completely change their career paths to open a dive center or resort or pursue exploration via tec diving.
3. We operate under a creed.
By that, I mean the PADI Professional’s Creed. Years ago, I co-created a formalized code of conduct embedded in the PADI Instructor Manual. It binds us as a culture, ensuring that an independent dive guide in Fiji and a dive resort in Bonaire operate with the same philosophical commitment to human transformation and excellence. It reminds us to view teaching and leading divers not as a transactions, but as transformational human experiences that we create across thousands of globally decentralized dive centers.
4. We mold PADI Divers into ocean ambassadors.
By blending the massive PADI membership network with the PADI AWARE Foundation®, we mobilize millions of divers into a global force for marine protection. Fundamentally, our purpose-driven lifestyle brand ecosystem has turned dive tourism into an interconnected, global social and positive ocean-change movement. Divers can participate in meaningful diver-citizen science and document real-world marine debris or shark and ray census data while diving at PADI Eco Centers.
5. We have established our PADI brand ethos under The Pillars of Ocean Change.
PADI pivoted its identity on its 50th anniversary in 2016 from a strict certification agency to a mission-driven global lifestyle brand under the banner, “Seek Adventure. Save the Ocean,” restructuring how the PADI AWARE Foundation integrates with local dive shops to turn passive recreation into active ocean conservation. By instituting this ethos and converting PADI’s footprint into a mechanism for positive global change, together we’re effectively turning a cadre of casual divers into one billion Ocean Torchbearers™ who continue to make a meaningful, positive and constructive difference as a community.
6. PADI’s training and educational tenets are forged from student-centered instructional design.
PADI’s modern curriculum is designed and built around a foundational, student-centered pillar: performance-based (not time-based) student progression. Long ago, we eliminated arbitrary time requirements and standardized the PADI performance-based educational system. Under the PADI System and skilled instruction by a PADI Professional, dive students advance only when they can comfortably and demonstrably perform a safety skill, regardless of how fast or slow they learn. This reduces anxiety and continues to open the ocean to millions who may have previously quit, or not even tried diving. Diver safety is Job 1 – implemented through student-centered valid instructional design and good leadership judgment – and thus is the cornerstone of PADI’s 60 years of growth and success.
PADI’s unique alchemy implementing and applying these six reasons is what makes PADI a purpose-driven, world-changing organization. The global PADI organization is entering an age in which, through scaling our blended unity, professionalism and dedication, we’ll do more to transform lives and save the ocean, only better and more effectively for more people.
I hope to see you at the DEMA Show.
Sincerely,
Drew Richardson
President & CEO
