How to become an instructor

What is expected of an ideal instructor candidate

Below is the portrait we reach for in an ideal candidate. Few people arrive with all of it already gathered, exceptions happen and the next block is about them, and the certificate is still decided on the training, not by how closely a form matches the list.

1. Your qualification and experience are not below Offshore Skipper on the course.
2. You explain the collision rules through the nuances that arise on a yacht, and you can say how to act once the situation is already alive, rather than through a list of clauses.
3. Stress is working weather for you: when the students are having a hard time, for example because the weather has turned, that is an ordinary day of your work. And after a night training passage that you have made with the students' watches, you still have the warmth and the strength in the morning to debrief the passage and to give the next task, sometimes as homework.
4. In every exercise you put the safety of the crew and the yacht first, and that shows while you explain, while people do the exercise, and in what you do yourself.
5. You settle a skill by different methods and you notice which of them is close to this person, to their style and to the way they are used to acting in life.
6. A positive tone is not a slogan with you. It is the tone in which an adult still wants to do the next exercise.
7. You have already taught adults, ideally as an assistant instructor in yachting, though other experience of teaching adults is also possible.
8. You know the programme you will teach because you have taken it yourself, and for a coastal week that programme is the Inshore course.

What your students, the future skippers, will expect of you

A student who comes onto a future course expects a person who is professional in two crafts at once: they can sail a yacht with confidence, and they can teach an adult. We do not prepare anyone for a sport. We prepare a skipper for a holiday, for an ordinary charter.

The certificate a person comes for confirms one thing: they can take a yacht on charter without a skipper and bring it back, with the people, in one piece. So the teaching is built around safety, the collision rules, and good seamanship, rather than around speed, winning, and heroics. The student expects the rules and the procedures to sit several heads higher in the instructor than in the group, and expects the teaching to run so that the skills of safe yachting have time to settle.

As a rule the student is already an adult, and they need a result and pleasure in the way the course goes in the same measure. They expect the instructor to find a way to each person, to build the exercises so there is enough strength to finish them, and to leave time to recover, so that the boat as a whole stays warm, rather than heroic.

When the ideal is not all there

An instructor certificate can also go to someone who is not an ideal candidate, but that is not a promise that any candidate will receive it: the training is where it shows whether a person is learning to train others and whether they share our approaches.

1. A young Inshore skipper arrives with strong theory and practice, and with a wish to teach, and can create situations for the students in which they learn.
2. A racing sailor feels the sail finely, and the only question is whether they can leave the methods by which they were taught as a child as a base, and use the approaches in order to teach a person who takes a yacht for a holiday.
3. A skipper who has chartered with friends for years and has already, many times, explained both the berthing and the handling of the yacht.
4. A dinghy instructor trained by another association already knows how to teach, and gathers the keelboat and the charter on this training.
5. A seafarer from a professional ship who knows the rules and procedures at a professional level, and only needs to refresh the approaches to teaching.

Why the certificate may not be issued

An instructor certificate is not issued because a person sat through the training. It may not be issued when the training shows a gap with what the student and the school expect. Below are the main points on which that usually becomes visible. The list is not exhaustive.

1. The knowledge of the collision rules does not reach the height from which one teaches: a nuance on the yacht is not unpacked, and when asked how to sail when a vessel is coming from the right, there is no example from the water.
2. The level is not enough to show the practice so that a student sees the manoeuvre and can repeat it themselves.
3. The safety of the crew and the yacht is not held first: a step that keeps the people and the yacht safe is skipped so that an exercise will come off, or the yacht is taken closer to heavy weather than the exercise needs.
4. The explanation stays a lecture: the adults listen, the skill does not reach the hands, and the instructor does not look for another way.
5. The explanation is complicated, and it matters more to the person to show how much they know than to carry the training through: they speak above the group and do not come down to someone who is hearing a rule for the first time.
6. There is not enough of a positive tone, and not enough steadiness under stress. The tiredness of the group is met with irritation, and after a night passage there is nothing left in the morning with which to debrief the watches and give the next task.

What this training is

This training does not teach yacht theory and does not build yachting practice again from the start.

Here the skill being trained is teaching: the method, how to build the course of learning, work with the crew and how an adult learns, safety, and the order of the exam.

This whole training works as an exam. It shows whether you are learning, whether you can separate charter from racing, and whether you understand the method and the principles by which the school runs a student's week.

What associations expect of an instructor

On the ISSA instructor careers page the association writes that an instructor is expected to be able to teach, not to demonstrate a manoeuvre, and to carry responsibility for safety and for assessment. Working instructors, commercial skippers, and coaches from other systems come there.

World Sailing, on its introductory course for instructors, says outright that on the training itself there is no time to teach the candidate to sail well, because the entry level is already there. Our training is built the same way. The RYA instructor code of conduct asks you to say in advance what is expected of the student and what they may expect in return, and to hand them responsibility for their own decisions. The workbook of their senior instructor adds this: before an exercise, ask yourself what could happen, including fatigue, and change the plan in time, and run the debrief as a conversation in which the person being taught talks more.

The Irish scheme, in a note before entry, does not count as confident a skill assembled only for the check day. They most often mark down coming alongside with no plan, and a person who switches off between tasks and sails the yacht carelessly.

The letter

If this training suits you, your next step is an application or a question.