Instructor Certification Training

Being an instructor opens up many opportunities to be Globally Employable!

I’ve been a Defensive Tactics Instructor teaching over 300 military police self-defense, felony take downs, cuffing techniques and weapons retention. If you want to be a hands on instructor of this type, you better be fit.

After serving as an operational EOD Tech, I transferred to the Naval Dive Salvage Training Center as an EOD Dive Instructor! Before we’re allowed to teach high-risk courses in the military, we must attend military instructor certification training, which was 3 weeks long in Pensacola, FL for me.

Between my break in EOD and the private military contractor world, I taught commercial real estate finance as I was a financial consultant for a Fortune 75 Firm and have actually done commercial real estate deals. After coming back to my world, I needed to update my CPR, AED and First Aid qualifications and decided to pick up the Red Cross Instructor Certification while I was there.

Because of my teaching background and my skill sets learned over the years, I was sent to Pakistan by the US State Department to teach their EOD Teams in advanced IED defeat techniques. I was there for 2 months and made about $42,000.00! Some friends of mine are making more than that in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When you become an instructor, you become more valuable to your customers or the people that are signing your checks.As I write this, I was actually sent on this job to be the supervisor because I was able to update everyone’s First Aid, CPR and AED qualifications.

That’s several thousand dollars in my bank account because I took the time to sit through the course. There were plenty of other supervisors with more experience than me that could have easily done this job.

I received my first Instructor certification training about a year and a half after becoming military law enforcement. The military needed more instructors to teach the growing number of soldiers that are used to protect our bases overseas.

Before attending the course, we had to try out by doing push ups, sit ups and a timed run. I was determined to make the cut as I knew that being an instructor would pull me off of some of the crappy assignments that junior military members get stuck with. It was a quality of life decision. Little did I know at the time that it would open up so many more doors for me.

Two FBI Agents came to my base, Naval Air Station Sigonella, Sicily, Italy to teach the course. They had been agents for a while and were passing on their skills to us. On the last day, they had to fly out to Waco where all the agents were gunned down while attempting to take down the cult/commune.

I had a hard time fitting in with law enforcement types. I’m just not wired that way. I got the “Throwing rocks in a glass house” talk daily. What I was able to do was use my instructor certification to be able to impress on some guys what the true mission was. Not just writing speeding tickets on base or hassling a guy because he had a few too many beers. It’s hard enough being stationed overseas to be worried about that!

Being a US Navy Deep Sea Dive Instructor is something you just don’t understand until you’ve done it. Now all of us from US Navy SCUBA, 2nd Class Dive, 1st Class Dive, SAT to EOD Divers have suffered through dive physics, dive medicine and of course, pool week!

It sucks as a student and even sucks as an instructor but there is a degree of satisfaction seeing a class come together (after beating them down) for weeks on end. I can say that as I was beat down too.

The course has changed a bit since I was at NDSTC but the ones wearing the Gold T-shirts rule the house.

I recommend starting out with the American Red Cross. You have to be certified in all of the courses before becoming an instructor and you should be anyway.

If you have questions about being an instructor certification training, regardless of the industry, use the Contact Me page and I’ll get back to you as soon as I pick up my Blackberry.

If you’ve never been an instructor, keep this in mind: When you’re up there doing a practice session in front of all the other soon-to-be instructors, they want you to succeed. It’s a great way to learn to speak in front of large or small groups of people and to begin being Globally Employable.

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