Resumé - Dive Instructor Tom

I arrived in Costa Rica as an IDC Staff Instructor to work for Rich Coast Diving, a 5* CDC owned by 2 PADI Course Directors. Besides being the manager of the dive shop, I also did my regular job as a dive instructor. I was teaching all levels of PADI courses, in a variety of languages: Dutch, French, English and Spanish to name the most common. I also assisted in IDC's to gain credit for my Master Instructor and to gain more experience in the academics of scuba. At Rich Coast Diving there are a lot of people doing their Divemaster internship, which helped me in being growing as a role model. This allowed me to help form new dive professionals and new role models to be released into the world of scuba diving.

Besides teaching I also guided certified divers on local dives and on more challenging excursions such as the ones to Islas Murciélagos where we encounter Bull Sharks and Manta Rays. Water temperature ranges from 14C to 28C, and visibility can go from 0.5m to 20m+, So I have guided and taught in a wide variety of conditions. I carried tanks, loaded boats, rinsed scuba equipment, drove the truck to and from the beach and functioned as an entertainer, dive professional and helping hand for all the divers and other clients. I was also responsible for or participated in the following activities:

Filling tanks, assisting on maintenance for the compressor and helping in repairs.
Doing the daily schedule for 3 boats, dividing fun divers and students into groups and assigning them to guides and assistants.
Maintenance, reparation and doing a full service on rental regulators and costumer regulators. Mainly Scubapro.
Doing emails to book new divers and students, to join in events, and to sort out orders for scuba equipment.
Closing the shop in the afternoon, doing sales and payments, attending to customers and keeping the shop clean.
Doing payments and processing receipts to do the monthly accounting.
Social media, editing videos and pictures.
General repairs in the shop
Making phone calls in Spanish and other languages to sort out problems with deliveries or equipment, collaborating with hotels and tour reps and attending to future clients.

In Belgium , I also worked as an independent PADI instructor, which means I had to look for new student divers myself and do everything from A to Z. This was an amazing learning experience, because organising a course yourself means doing everything, from marketing to renting/buying scuba equipment, to finding a spot to do the dives, to doing all the administration and paperwork. Besides that, the diving conditions in Belgium are very different from those in the tropics. All of this made me a much more skilled dive instructor, both in and out of the water.

TODI in Beringen is a unique project in Belgium, where an old coal mining site has been transformed into a diver's paradise. There is an aquarium with tropical fish where divers and snorkelers can practice their skills or go for a fun dive. In TODI, I worked as a freelance instructor, mainly doing initiations with new clients. The initiations in TODI are high-end, where the student divers learn the basics of diving in a timespan of 3 hours: Some theory, some skills in a shallow pool and dive time in the 10m deep dive bassin. During these hours, we teach the novices all about equipment and buoyancy, which means they make an actual dive at the end of the initiation, perfecting and adjusting their buoyancy themselves. Working with beginners gives me a lot of satisfaction and is, in my opinion, the best way to become a better instructor. Many of the issues I encountered in these initiations, helped me giving better courses.

I was working as a divemaster and later as an instructor for Blue Paradise Diving Center, the number 1 diving center in Hurghada on TripAdvisor. Our boat made daily diving trips with up to 30 people on board, to a variety of reefs, over 60 in total. The diving related duties consisted of guiding daily divers, teaching courses and doing introduction dives, but the work didn’t stop there. On the boat we had an office where we organized the day and did logistics. This means choosing the diving spots of the day, which depends on a lot of variables, dividing the guests into optimal groups, doing payments, selling branded merchandise and keeping stock, managing the contracts of the clients and checking the equipment of the people that are checking out that day, organizing special trips and so on. Besides those, other daily duties consisted of carrying tanks and equipment boxes, preparing the boat, welcoming people, doing briefings (welcome, boat, snorkel, introduction dive and daily dive), making drawings for every dive site, fixing equipment, a thousand of other smaller duties and of course entertaining the guests. Being responsible for this amount of important tasks helped me grow as a diver, a teacher and a manager.

I was working as a divemaster intern and later as a divemaster with Dressel Divers in the Iberostar Tucan resort in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Usually, I made one dive per day and served as an extra pair of eyes in the back of the group or, after getting the divemaster certification, guided the dives myself. Everyday, I did about a few dozen or more dive demos in the resort pool with tourists, resulting in tons of experience with complete novices. This combined with approaching people and trying to make them excited for diving, gave me a lot of experience in sales. I was the top selling intern for the majority of my stay.

Resumé of Tom Bonte

Personal Info

Diving Info

Languages

Diving Education

Work Experience

Extra Skills

(Underwater) Photography

TecRec

Language Coaching

Computer skills and programming