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.
Why Traditional Advanced Isn’t Always the Most Efficient Step
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.
A Better Alternative: Deep, Navigation & EANx Specialties
Here’s what you get when you choose full specialty courses instead:
1. Qualified to Dive Deeper (Up to 40 m)
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.
2. Confidence and Precision With Underwater Navigation
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.
3. Dive Smarter With Nitrox
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.
Extra Benefits That Really Matter
Earn Recognized Specialist Certifications
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:
- SSI Specialty Diver (from completing 2 specialties and 12 logged dives)
- SSI Advanced Specialty Diver (4 specialties + 24 logged dives)
- SSI Master Diver (4 specialties, Diver Stress & Rescue, + 50 logged dives)
That means you’re building measurable progress toward advanced recognition levels rather than just adding one broad qualification.
Stronger Core Skills to Level Up Your Diving
Not only do these specialties improve your technical competence, they also build practical confidence that directly impacts how comfortable you feel underwater:
- Better depth planning and air management
- Reliable navigation skills — no more losing your way
- Extended dive times and safer repetitive dive profiles
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.
Who This Path Is Best For
This specialty path is ideal if you want:
- More real qualifications and credentials
- Deeper certification than the standard 30 m recreational limit
- Skills that matter for travel dives, liveaboards, and varied environments
- Faster progress toward Advanced Specialty Diver and Master Diver ratings
Final Takeaway
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