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Congratulations! You’ve completed your Open Water Diver certification — you’re now a qualified diver ready to explore the world’s reefs, wrecks, walls and drop-offs. But what’s the best next step after Open Water? Rather than heading straight into a traditional Advanced Open Water Diver course, there’s a high-value alternative that gives you deeper qualifications, real skills, and faster progress toward advanced ratings: taking three full specialty courses — Deep Diver, Navigation, and Enriched Air Nitrox (EANx) — in place of a single broad course.
The SSI Advanced Open Water Diver program lets you try five adventure dives from a list of specialties like deep, navigation, wreck, night and others. It’s designed as an introduction to advanced skills and helps you gain confidence under supervision.
However, because the adventure dives are sample experiences rather than full certifications, you don’t finish with distinct specialty cards — and that limits the real value of the training when it comes to logged achievement and progression.
Here’s what you get when you choose full specialty courses instead:
The Deep Diver specialty teaches you how to plan and execute dives to depths up to 40 m/130 ft, safely manage gas consumption, and handle deeper dive planning effectively. This goes further than the typical depths you’re introduced to during adventure dives alone and equips you with a certification to dive deeper legally and confidently. This is 10m deeper than the 30m the Advanced Open Water Diver course qualifies you to.
The Navigation specialty focuses on practical compass use and natural navigation techniques. Rather than just a taster during an adventure dive, full navigation training gives more practice and skill development, helping you find your way underwater reliably and making you a more independent and confident diver.
The Enriched Air Nitrox (EANx) course teaches you how to plan dives using enriched air mixtures (up to 40% oxygen), expanding your bottom time, increasing safety margins, and allowing shorter surface intervals between dives — a huge advantage on dive trips and liveaboards.
Completing these three specialties gives you three separate SSI specialty certifications — each one a credential you can proudly show and use. As part of SSI’s recognitions pathway, these specialties also count toward higher ratings like:
That means you’re building measurable progress toward advanced recognition levels rather than just adding one broad qualification.
Not only do these specialties improve your technical competence, they also build practical confidence that directly impacts how comfortable you feel underwater:
These are skills you’ll use on every dive, not just boxes you tick. And they form a stronger foundation if you want to continue to professional pathways like Divemaster or Instructor later on.
This specialty path is ideal if you want:
When you’re asking “What’s the best next step after Open Water?”, the answer isn’t always to follow tradition. Choosing Deep, Navigation and EANx specialties instead of or alongside a standard Advanced Open Water program gives you greater depth capability, real specialty certifications, smarter dive planning skills, and a clearer path toward advanced recognition — all in roughly the same amount of training time. That’s more value for your time and investment, and better skills for every dive you take
Ocean Tribe Dive Team
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