CONSERVATION DIVEMASTER

Your first week is spent with your Divemaster Coordinators working through the foundational workshops that will sharpen your diving skills and teach you how to lead divers safely in the water.

After an orientation day to meet your team, collect your equipment pack, and understand the structure of your training, you’ll move straight into the water. The Fluid Mechanics Buoyancy Workshop refines your finning, hovering, and SMB deployment techniques through classroom theory followed by a dedicated pool session.

Over the next two days, you’ll progress through both parts of the PADI Skills Circuit — learning to demonstrate all 24 Open Water skills to demonstration quality — while also completing your Water Skills and Rescue Assessments.

The week then shifts to open water, where you’ll practise giving dive briefings and leading dives with fellow candidates roleplaying as fun divers, facing and solving realistic problems in real conditions. The Deep Scenario adds an additional layer of challenge, combining dive leadership with underwater navigation at depth.

Week two builds directly on your first week’s foundations, introducing more complex Divemaster-run programs and practical scenarios. You’ll learn how to conduct PADI Discover Scuba Diving sessions — first in the pool, then in open water — alongside the PADI ReActivate and Skin Diver programs, developing the knowledge and in-water confidence to run these independently.

A dedicated Search & Recovery workshop covers search patterns, nautical knots, lift bag use, and locating lost objects underwater, combining classroom theory with afternoon dives. Toward the end of the week, you’ll join our Conservation Instructors for the two-day REACT Conservation Workshop — an introduction to marine conservation theory applied directly in the water — completing your core workshop requirements before moving into the internship and assessment phase.

Days off are built into the week and can also be used to dive independently, work on E-Learning, or progress your Mapping Project.

The second half of your Divemaster training shifts away from structured workshops and into real-world practice. Your schedule becomes more flexible during these two weeks — the projects and assessments can be completed in any order — but the standard is higher and the stakes are real.

You’ll begin your Mapping Project, working independently or as a group to chart a full dive site or a section of one on Koh Tao, developing the observation, spatial awareness, and underwater precision that define a competent dive professional. You’ll also spend time shadowing a working Black Turtle Divemaster across a full boat trip — handling paperwork, packing equipment, delivering briefings, leading dives, and logging — so you can see exactly what the role looks like from the inside.

Your practical assessments run across four progressive stages. You’ll start by assisting a Black Turtle Instructor during the Confined Water portion of a PADI Open Water Course, then move into the open ocean to assist across the full Open Water training dives. From there you’ll join either a PADI Advanced Open Water or Rescue Course, developing the adaptability and communication skills needed to support more experienced student divers.

The phase closes with your Final Leads — a supervised assessment dive where you brief, lead, and manage a group of co-candidates playing the role of real customers, solving pre-assigned problems underwater while demonstrating the full scope of your Divemaster judgment and leadership. E-Learning and exams must be completed before this final assessment, and your Mapping Project submitted beforehand.

Your fifth week builds the ecological and technical foundation you need to become a confident, reef-safe professional. You’ll begin with an introduction to tropical reef ecosystems and the challenges they face, from coral bleaching to overfishing.

The first four days are dedicated to our Ecological Monitoring Program (EMP) — our flagship scientific diving certification, teaching the standardised protocols used to monitor fish populations, invertebrate abundance, and benthic coverage. Across four consecutive modules covering Marine Ecology, Invertebrates, Fish, and Substrate, you’ll develop the technical skills required to conduct professional-level environmental assessments and become an active contributor to the long-term reef health datasets that help local managers distinguish between natural seasonal shifts and human-driven degradation.

After a rest day, you’ll complete your first Coral Taxonomy session, beginning to distinguish coral genera and build the identification skills you’ll deepen the following week. The week finishes with assessment dives to consolidate everything you’ve learned, with instructor feedback to prepare you for what’s ahead.

You’ll also begin exploring ideas for your Independent Project — a conservation or education initiative aligned with your interests — so you arrive at Week 6 ready to hit the ground running.

Week six deepens your ecological knowledge and begins your role as an active contributor to BTC’s ongoing research. You’ll complete Coral Taxonomy & Identification Part II, learning to recognise a wider range of coral genera and identify early signs of stress or compromised health, with taxonomy-focused dives to apply this knowledge in real reef conditions.

You’ll also take part in our in-house Sea Slugs Ecology session and guided sea slug identification dives, contributing sightings to our local database and sharpening your observation skills. You’ll learn Sea Turtle Ecology & Monitoring and take part in a snorkel-based monitoring session using respectful, non-intrusive techniques, adding your records to our long-term wildlife datasets.

Throughout the week, you’ll develop your Independent Project — refining your focus, gathering data, and building your findings into a format you can communicate clearly. The week closes with your project presentation to the group, where you’ll share your methods, outcomes, and recommendations, rounding off the conservation phase with a tangible contribution of your own.

Your final two weeks are where your training becomes active contribution. Mirroring the internship structure of your Divemaster phase, you’ll now assist our Conservation Instructors across live BTC courses — supporting lectures, survey dives, and field sessions alongside real students and helping deliver the same programme you completed yourself. This is where your accumulated knowledge starts to take on a professional shape.

Alongside course assists, you’ll complete any outstanding surveys from your 10-survey requirement, joining the BTC team in the water for EMP monitoring, coral restoration, wildlife counts, and any other fieldwork running during your final weeks. When you’re ready, you’ll step up to lead two full surveys independently: one snorkel-based survey — turtles or sharks — and one scuba-based survey, choosing from sea slugs, crown-of-thorns, restoration, or EMP. These lead surveys are your practical demonstration that you can plan, brief, conduct, and debrief a scientific dive to professional standard.

These two weeks are also your buffer. If there are knowledge reviews, assessments, or any programme requirements still outstanding, this is the time to close them out. The schedule is flexible enough to accommodate weather delays, additional survey opportunities, or anything that needs a second pass. The programme finishes with a final debrief, certification wrap-up, and a conversation about next steps — professional pathways, conservation progression, and how to put everything you’ve built here to work in the field.