Since there is no agency or laws governing (in either the USA or Canada) Certification for Survival Training does anyone see a real reason to either offer it and or not offer it. As well can anyone come up with a compelling reason why Individual Survival Instructors and Companies should get together and create a ‘Standard’ for Certification?

i.e. Would it be worth the effort?

Good question.

I think that it might help if such groups created a standard amongst themselves, just like sports or other recreational organizations have, as there are quite a few people who have been injured or worse during ill-fated "training sessions".

How such a standard would be created/implemented, or even how effective it'd be, I've no idea...

When I'm not using my first aid kit to minister to beautiful ladies or saving ETS from idiot body armor spammers, I'm a network security consultant. In my line of work, certification is important because customers expect it, and the manufacturers whose products we sell demand it. For example, to be a Cisco Gold Partner you need to employ a minimum of four CCIE-certified individuals. For even a medium-sized Cisco reseller the difference between Gold and Silver partnership (which only requires two CCIEs) could be millions of dollars a year in profit.

You're not facing the same kinds of pressure, you're looking for ways to differentiate good instructors. Historically they've done so via resumes (former Army Ranger, graduate of SERE, SAR Team Leader, etc) and word-of-mouth.

Another major difference is market size and recognition. IT is a very large industry and there's a lot of money in it. Survival instruction is much smaller, and there isn't nearly as much money or name recognition. You'd need to have really good marketing to make this work.

I think the term "survival" has a lot of meanings to various people, in varied scenarios. Most situations call for getting through an unexpected night or handling an unexpected delay in reaching relative safety. An injury could be involved, a navigation error, broken down trasportation, a wide variety of situations caused by a wide variety of reasons.

I think it would be difficult to certify a school or an instructor because the techinque could vary so much between areas, regions and reasons for being in need of "survival" skills. For instance, a pilot flying over Alaska would need skills and gear that differed greatly from someone dayhiking in the desert in cool weather. Some skills are always the same, but many are totally different. What would be the basic criteria to certify an instructor on? Basics or terrain and climate specifics?

Another aspect that could play in is legal issues. A "certified instructor" that teaches primitive skills later is sued by a student that injures themselves in a way that could be linked to that instruction. A grey area, potentially.

To determine if this would or would not be useful, it would be helpful to know for what purpose you envision a Certificate in Survival would serve.

Pete

It may be hard or impossible to draft a standard curriculum for all survival schools (whatever variety of survival they aim to teach). But one of the motivations for having certification is legal, and it may make some sense to create some sort of structure to prevent student deaths.

I hear from a friend of a friend a long time ago, that in the UK martial arts schools have to go through some sort of approval process that is mostly concerned with safety. This may be the role of professional organizations or of the government: making sure that people don't die from instructor's gross negligence or incompetence.

You could still get hurt from the training, but just not from potential idiocy. After all, yoga is big business with certification structures, and people get hurt regularly because of the inherent dangers that are just coming to light.

One reason to not do it would be to avoid .gov taking it over and charging exorbitant fees to continue your certification. That would be the natural progression. It might be best to not create this monster.

It takes money to set up, administer, and operate any such certification system. And generally when it comes to such programs, I would argue that it's often not for the sake of the students, but really for the benefit of the instructors. The certification then becomes a way to exclude instructors with differing ideas or a way to limit the number of instructors. Material that doesn't fall neatly into some "standard" curriculum can too easily be labeled "wrong" or "dangerous" or whatever. I think certain topics are amenable to a certification process and make a lot of sense, but I personally don't think "survival training" (whatever gazillion possible teaching points that includes) is one of those topics.

Of course, no one wants totally unqualified mall ninja types to be teaching a survival course with their own wacky survival mumbo jumbo, but I would think word of mouth would quickly weed those schools/instructors out without any sort of organization required to do it. And there's no reason why someone needs to be ex-military or had to have trained at certain survival schools or certain other pedigree to be a competent instructor with good information to pass along. A housewife who is into scouting and the outdoors, for example, could be an excellent "survival" instructor and the perfect teacher for many folks.

But hey, caveat emptor and if someone still wants to fork over their hard earned money to be taught by a particular instructor, that should be their right to do so. And if those students like the class and recommend it to others, then more power to that school/instructor, even if others may disagree with what is being taught.

The field of "survival" is rather hazy and vague, as previous posters have pointed out, both in terms of skills to learn and widely differing environments. While schools can be helpful, there is nothing like varied experience. Another issue is that survival is basically very simple and basic - fire, food, shelter, and first aid- handle those issues well and you will be in pretty good shape, most of the time. Many analysts have pointed out that one of the key ingredients is a successful scenario is "will to survive" and there are some astounding examples of that. How precisely would a key ability like that be taught?

I once had the dubious pleasure of retrieving the corpse of an individual abandoned by his companions along a remote trail. His "buddies" fled to a lower elevation, reaching the trail head successfully, and then called in the emergency. Subsequent investigation revealed that the victim's two companions were recent graduates of a winter survival course, something hard to believe because the narrative of their trip was a comedy of errors, with an extremely tragic ending.

I guess I am just a bit skeptical of schools of this ilk. I would be less so if the subject matter were better defined, as well as what constitutes proficiency.

I think the BSA model might be one way to look. They have well defined classes and criteria for just about everything they teach.

The NRA has a similar well defined set of classes. The NRA training model has the advantage of being usable either by volunteer instructors or for profit, and seems to work pretty well both ways.

The reality is that most "survival" schools don't seem to be real businesses. They seem mostly to be set up by guys who are barely hanging on financially with lots of PT instructors and not much in the way of facilities. I don't know that they can afford to come up with something more uniform, or that they would be willing to do so. Many seem like pretty serious control freaks. Getting a majority of them to agree on much of anything might not be that easy.

I forget who did it but there is some group that has setup some kind of web site to teach a set of bush craft skills. I looked at it and it looked like there could be a lot of cross over.

I am not real sure just what you want to certify either. Are you certifying that each member of the class has learned certain skills? or that the instructors are capable of teaching certain skills? Or that the instructors are actually teaching the skills and the students are learning them?