IANTD and The Human Diver have announced that they have teamed up to provide a specific IANTD website offering the online human factors online micro-class.

Diving always has an inherent risk of death or injury due to the environment we expose ourselves to. However, despite this risk, the rewards are often very much worth it, which is why we continue to dive and explore. Technical advances, such as rebreathers, cold water regulators, lights and thermal protection have improved safety by addressing the technical component, and training materials now facilitate greater learning with a modular approach and lessons learned from science and practice being applied.

However, until recently, nothing has been done to improve our understanding of human performance and cognitive failures in a coherent manner when considering situational awareness, decision making, communications, teamwork, leadership and performance shaping factors, lessons which the aviation, nuclear, healthcare and the oil and gas sectors have recognised for decades when it comes to improving safety and performance.

That changed when Gareth Lock from The Human Diver launched his Human Factors in Diving programmes in January 2016. Since then he has taught more than 210 divers face-to-face across the globe and enrolled more than 1000 divers on his online micro-classes. The online micro-class won the TekDiveUSA18 Innovation Award ‘For innovation and/or product design that has increased the safety and extended the field of technical diving.’

He has also worked with the heads of ITs and instructors from numerous agencies to improve their performance, along with the scientific diving and military diving communities to improve diving safety and adjust culture. Finally, in both 2017 and 2018, he was nominated for Divers Alert Network’s DAN Rolex Diver of the Year.

IANTD and The Human Diver are pleased to announce that they have teamed up to provide a specific IANTD website offering this online programme, one of the first agencies to publicly and formally recognise the benefit of learning and then applying this topic to diving to improve diver and team performance and as a consequence, diver safety.

The programme can be accessed via www.iantd-hf.com which is a portal which will allow different regions to access the programme and is highly recommended as pre-course learning for diver, instructor and instructor training. Currently, only an English language video is available but the aim is to produce subtitled videos and specific language versions in due course.

Phil Short, IANTD UK Training Director, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club says of the course:

“This (Human Factors) course instilled in me the importance of this additional knowledge and skill set within diving. With this in mind, as Training Director of IANTD UK, I highly recommend the micro-class as pre-learning for Diver, Instructor and Instructor Trainer candidates at all levels.”

Oli van Overbeek, Tech Editor of Scubaverse says:

“I’ve participated in this online micro-class and was very impressed with its content, both written and video, as well as the questions it posed. I recommend the online class to all divers, especially those in a teaching position.”

Learn more and subscribe at www.iantd-hf.com.