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Want an exciting career? Learn how to dive, weld and work underwater. Take our course in Air Mixed Gas Surface Supplied (helmet diving) and get your commercial diving certification in just four months. Partial financing now available.

International Diving Institute (IDI) is a member of Association of Diving Contractors International (ADC) and trains to the Standards published by the Association of Commercial Diving Educators (ACDE), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the National Association of SCUBA Educators (NASE), and the Sea Research Society (SRS). The Institute's mission is to provide and prepare our graduates for a career in the commercial diving industry as entry-level divers/tenders who excel in knowledge, skills and safety.

Come Weld With Us!

Your journey as a professional diver has just begun!

When you enter today's tough, but very exciting and rewarding field of commercial diving, you will have the opportunity to find yourself a career that offers you personal satisfaction, advancement and diversity of assignments.*

Today's diving industry calls for life-long training. Many people change careers two or three times in a lifetime. Commercial diving can provide a career with endless growth potential while engaging in a vast array of opportunities. In just a few months you can be on your way to this highly respected career. Whether you plan to do underwater burning or underwater welding, IDI can offer you the appropriate courses through IDI's top quality commercial diving school. This is accomplished through IDI's open water and hands-on commercial divers training which covers all levels of learning.

Real-world projects, pressures and deadlines are used to help acquire the high demand skills for commercial diving. IDI's curriculum provides both entry level and advanced diver training. IDI's facility is designed as a safe, yet realistic, open water work-site environment located on the old navy base in Charleston, South Carolina. IDI has on-site access to an ex-Navy YD (yards and docks) crane barge, for training purposes. IDI's students not only gain technical skills, but also develop the professional qualities that are attractive to employers of commercial divers. IDI houses Sea Research Society's library at its main campus. That library includes hundreds of books, magazines, maps and charts. It also includes thousands of prints, photographs and slides relating to sport and commercial divers and a wide range of dive related work. Students can read about and research everything from sunken treasure to the evolution of diving gear.

Students can take courses relating to SCUBA instruction (from basic open-water diver to instructor level) and air/mixed gas surface supplied diving (commercial applications).

IDI has two 54" hyperbaric chambers (for recompression and decompression), one of which is fitted out for saturation diving (i.e. a dive bell can be attached to it). The other, built in the United Kingdom (UK), was certified by Lloyd's in 2004. IDI has a wide variety of equipment by manufacturers and designers such as Desco, Gorsky, Klein, Miller Dunn, and Kirby Morgan. Our main campus and dive site is located on the Cooper River less than one block from the H.L. Hunley submarine conservation lab and only minutes from the heart of historic Charleston's tourist center.

Divers can purchase commercial dive equipment through IDI's retail dive facility, located at their corporate headquarters in Summerville, South Carolina. Recreational (scuba) diving equipment may also be purchased or rented there as well. Why train in weather that is either too cold or too hot? Be like the millions of tourists who visit Charleston every year, come and enjoy South Carolina's coastal climate, sand beaches and fine dining.

* IDI prefers and uses the terms commercial diving, commercial divers and professional divers. However, professional divers are frequently known to the general public as deepsea (deep-sea) divers, helmet divers and hardhat divers.

Established in 1996

The International Diving Institute was established as the East Coast Dive Connection LLC in 1996 and has been actively engaged in teaching diving since that date. Its name was officially changed to International Diving Institute LLC in 2004.

Licensure

The International Diving Institute is licensed by the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education, 1333 Main Street, Suite 200, Columbia, SC 29201; 803.737.2260. Licensure indicates only that the minimum standards have been met and it is not an endorsement or guarantee of quality by the State.