Simon Talbot

Background

About Simon Talbot

I began my career as a Technical Officer with the Tasmanian Department of Sea Fisheries, and spent a decade undertaking abalone research across a range of locations around Australia. After this I moved to a Fisheries Management role with the Australian Fisheries Management Authority in Canberra for a few years (working in the East Coast Tuna and Billfish and Southeast Non-trawl Fisheries), before taking on the role of Diving Officer at the University of Tasmania in early 1998. With the support of key academic colleagues, we built the diving capacity of UTAS to the point where they became one of the preeminent diving marine science organisations in Australia. In 2002 I joined the Standards Australia SF17 Diving Committee, and both this and my UTAS role contributed to me developing a keen interest in ensuring that occupational divers (particularly scientific divers) received quality training, and that their organisations had access to diving management systems which let their divers make informed judgments whilst working ‘in the field’. This led to my working with Paul Butler from the Australian Diver Accreditation Scheme, to build the original ADAS Part 1 restricted diving course (initially for diving scientists), and I accredited the University of Tasmania as the first educational ADAS Training Establishment (ATE) in 2004. I was the UTAS ADAS Training and Assessment Manager until 2023, and ran between at least one ‘science focused’ occupational diving course each year (and 2-3 for many years). My desire to provide quality training for occupational divers has only increased as my experience in this area has grown, and given the increasing rigour around WHS requirements over the last decade, I see the need for this this as more important than ever. In 2023 I left the University of Tasmania, to further my career as a diver trainer with the Commercial Dive Academy, where I run several ‘scientific style’ ADAS part 1 courses each year, as as well as ‘commercial ADAS Part 1, Part 2 and Onshore Dive Supervisor courses.