 In 1985 the first PADI Instructor Course was conducted at the College. That is a long time ago and since then it never stopped. Every year many Instructor Level certifications have been issued, now adding up to multiple thousands. Jan was there from the beginning (seen on the right on the picture in the pool) – first as a Staff Instructor, later as a Course Director. Daniela joined the team five years later.
In the beginning it was PADI Europe who was the owner of the College – then called the PADI European College. In the current form, the College exists since 1994. When PADI started to operate on the European market, it was necessary to have a top location for the training of PADI Instructors. In those days, it was the only location apart from some individually organized courses in hotel facilities around Europe.
 When PADI became more and more known, several dive operations around Europe received the status of Instructor Development Center and were authorized to train instructors themselves. In 1994 the number was big enough to support the market. PADI did not see a need anymore to be active in training and decided to dedicate all its time and resources to supporting diver training (rather than engaging in the training itself). The fantastic logistic was then offered to Daniela to open her own training center – the College.
In 1996, the College was the first dive center in Europe to receive the prestigious Career Development Center status and has continued to fulfill the requirements for that status until today. The College is still the only dive center in France to fulfill the elevated requirements.
 In 2000, the College was selected by PADI to test the new Instructor Development curriculum that was introduced in 2001. It was an honor for the College to be given such a big influence on the way instructors were going to be trained in the future. In 2009 that honor was repeated for the curriculum to be released in 2010.
In 2005 the College started its own in-house publishing company called Scuba Publications. The intent is to create books and support materials for courses that are normally hardly or not supported by PADI materials. Today books and materials from Scuba Publications are used in dive centers around the world.
 A milestone for the College was the creation of the Scuba-Eco initiative in 2009. The project allows divers to actively engage themselves in the protection of local aquatic environments. The project was supported by Project AWARE and Scuba Publications.
The latest development in the services of the College is its online training capacity. For this purpose the College (together with WorldService) created an internet page with online courses for instructors and a page with online courses for divers. To support the activities of the online courses and the publishing of course support materials, a special online shop for instructors was created as part of the project. |
