From the Chilean Licence to International Saturation: The Real Route

Why this question comes up so often, and why the answer is uncomfortable

You watch a video of a diver coming out of a bell in the North Sea, with the wage mentioned in the description, and the question just appears: how do I get there from Puerto Montt or Punta Arenas? You search Google and find "commercial diving" courses in Valparaíso, but none of them mention saturation. That's not a flaw in your search. It's that, according to the data we've been able to verify, no school in Chile is known to train divers in saturation diving. Not among the centres we could verify (SIS Capacitaciones, INSUBUCEO), nor among the ones we couldn't confirm in detail. Saturation is studied outside the country, and you get to study it after building up years of surface-supplied diving — it isn't the natural next step after a six-month course in Chile.

This doesn't mean it's impossible. It means the path has stages, that each stage costs time and money, and that no one is going to sum it up for you in an Instagram ad. This post tries to be that honest summary: what you need to do, in what order, what part of your Chilean experience is useful abroad, and what real obstacles you'll run into. To understand first exactly what saturation diving is — how the closed bell works, why you live for days inside a pressurised chamber — see what a saturation diver is.

Step 1: the Chilean licence, the mandatory starting point

It all starts the same way as if your goal were to stay working in salmon farms in Chile: with the DIRECTEMAR licence (Dirección General del Territorio Marítimo y de Marina Mercante, under the Navy). There's no international shortcut that skips this step, because you need real professional diving hours before any foreign certifying body takes you seriously, and those hours you're going to build up here.

The category you want if your plan is to go abroad is Commercial Diver, the highest of the operational categories: it authorises you to work with "any equipment needed to carry out underwater work", under DIRECTEMAR's TM-035 regulation. To get licensed as a commercial diver you need to be 18 years old and hold an upper-secondary school leaving certificate (or the technical/professional equivalent).

Source: DIRECTEMAR — frequently asked questions on professional diving and ChileAtiende, entry 1240

Before the licence comes the training. In Chile there are centres that prepare you for the Commercial Diver exam; two with verified data are SIS Capacitaciones in Valparaíso (Muelle Barón), with a 6-month, 630-hour course with a specialism in underwater welding, and INSUBUCEO in Valparaíso (Playa Las Torpederas), with a four-and-a-half-month course. For the full detail on prices, schedules and requirements at these and other centres, see our guide to schools and how to become a commercial diver. If you also want the step-by-step detail aimed specifically at the Chilean market, there's a sister post in this same series: how to become a commercial diver in Chile.

Step 2: years of water time, not months of coursework

This is the part course ads don't tell you: between getting the licence and being ready for saturation, there's a long stretch of real work, usually in aquaculture or industrial air-diving operations, which is where most of the available work is concentrated in regions like Los Lagos, Aysén and Magallanes. That's where you build up dive hours, learn to work in current, with poor visibility, under production pressure, and build the dive history you'll later have to show — logbook, medical certificates and references — when you apply to a school or an international employer.

There's no official figure for exactly how many years you need before moving on to saturation: that depends on the foreign school, the employer and how many certifiable hours you rack up per year. What is consistent in the trade is that it's a matter of years, not months, and that this time is also what you use to decide seriously whether commercial diving is for you before spending money on training abroad.

With Ley N° 21.789 (Ley de Buzos), published on 17 February 2026 and in force from around 17 August 2026, this stretch should end up better documented: the law creates an inspectable electronic register of dives and safety conditions, and promotes certification of workplace competencies. It's the first time a diver's employment contract has been regulated in Chile. The joint regulation from the Ministries of Labour and Defence, which must set technical requirements and safety standards, still hasn't published depths or oxygen or chamber standards — so nothing can be said about that yet.

Source: Diario Constitucional, 17 Feb 2026

Step 3: a recognised international certification — and why the Chilean licence isn't enough

Here's the point that frustrates most people once they start researching seriously: the DIRECTEMAR licence is a Chilean qualification, valid for working in Chile, but it has no automatic recognition in the international schemes of HSE (United Kingdom), IMCA (the body that represents commercial diving and underwater engineering companies worldwide) or ADCI (United States). There's no official equivalence table saying "Chilean Commercial Diver licence = such-and-such HSE level". Each school and each international employer assesses the case individually: sometimes your Chilean experience and licence count in your favour, shortening the programme or getting your application taken seriously; sometimes they count for nothing and you have to start the full international programme from scratch. There's no way to know in advance without asking directly at the specific school you're applying to, and asking the type of employer you're aiming for too, because different ones require different certifications.

In practice, this means the realistic path involves getting certified in a recognised international scheme, studying outside Chile — Australia is one of the destinations that comes up in searches from people researching this route, along with the United Kingdom and the United States — and that this process is independent of the Chilean licence, not an extension of it. For the detail on which certifications exist and what each one covers, see our guide to certifications.

Step 4: offshore surface-supplied diving work — the rung almost no one mentions

Before getting onto a saturation course, most international routes require an already-worked surface-supplied diving track record in an offshore or industrial setting, not just certification on paper. In other words: you get certified abroad, and then you work for a while as a surface-supplied diver — air or surface-supplied — within that international system, before you're considered for a saturation course. It's the same pattern as in Chile: licence first, then years of water time. Abroad it repeats: certification first, then years of offshore water time, and only then saturation.

To understand where this type of diving is done internationally and what kind of work each region offers, see where saturation diving work is found, and to find out what kind of vessels this operation runs on — dive support vessels with bell systems and decompression chambers — see dive support vessels.

Step 5: only then, the closed bell

Saturation — living in a pressurised chamber for days or weeks, going out to work in a closed bell at the job's depth and returning to the chamber without decompressing until the end of the tour — is the highest and most demanding rung in the trade, both technically and physically. You get there with years of diving behind you, not straight out of a course. If you're reading this thinking about jumping straight in from zero, the honest answer is that jump doesn't exist: there's a ladder, and this is the top rung, not the first one.

For the technical detail of what working in saturation involves — tours, chambers, bell, specific risks — the full reference is what a saturation diver is.

The full route, stage by stage

What travels well from the Chilean profile

It isn't all obstacles. A diver trained and toughened on the Chilean coast arrives with things an international employer values, even if they don't show up on any diploma:

• Real cold-water hours. Working in Los Lagos, Aysén or Magallanes means learning to operate in low temperatures and demanding conditions from day one, something that has to be trained separately in other parts of the world.
• Experience in current. The Patagonian fjords and channels aren't swimming pools: current is part of the daily job, and that ability to read and work with it can't be improvised.
• Work in aquaculture. The bulk of Chilean professional diving happens at salmon farming sites, with repetitive underwater work shifts, net inspection, mortality removal, structures — operational discipline that translates well to other industrial diving settings.

None of this replaces the international certification you'll be asked for. But it is the real argument you can bring to an interview or an application: you're not selling a piece of paper, you're selling hard water hours already lived.

The practical obstacles no one sums up for you in a video

Language

Training and work in saturation are done mostly in English, both in the classroom and in job-site communications, where a misunderstanding has serious consequences. If your technical English isn't up to scratch, that's prior work as real as any of the previous steps.

Visas

Studying and working in Australia, the UK or the US requires the visa that matches each country and each activity (study, work), with its own requirements and timeframes, which change over time and depend on your particular situation. This isn't something that can be summed up in a generic paragraph: you need to check it directly with the school you're applying to and with the destination country's immigration authorities.

The cost of training abroad

We don't have verified prices for international saturation schools, so we're not going to make them up. What can be said with the data we do have: training in Chile already has a known cost — the SIS Capacitaciones course in Valparaíso, for example, costs CLP 2,900,000 in total (a CLP 900,000 enrolment fee including equipment, plus 5 interest-free instalments of CLP 400,000) — and on top of that, for the international route, you have to add the cost of certification abroad, travel, the visa, and living costs while you study and while you build up the surface-supplied hours required before saturation. It's a long investment, in time and money, that's worth planning calmly rather than based on what an ad promises.

Wages: why a direct comparison doesn't work

You'll find international saturation diving wage figures circulating in forums and videos, almost always in dollars or pounds, with no clear source. We're not going to repeat them here because we don't have a verified figure for international saturation wages that we can attribute to a specific source. What we can explain is why comparing those loose figures with a commercial diver's wage in Chile isn't useful.

First, because these are different labour markets, with different costs of living, currencies, tax burdens and contract structures from one another. Second, because an offshore saturation wage isn't comparable with an entry-level commercial diving wage in Chile: it's the pay for the highest stage of the career, after the whole route described above, not a starting point. For a serious, sourced reference on what a diver earns in Chile — with WageIndicator/Tusalario figures and the STS Chile Commercial Diving Supervisor job listing that we do have documented, along with their limits — see how much a diver earns. It also explains there why you should be wary of direct conversions to dollars or euros without stating the exchange rate and date.

What the work looks like, day to day, at each point on the route

One thing you can't skip: safety

Chilean commercial diving has a harsh recent history, and it's worth keeping that in mind before idealising any stage of the path, including the international one. According to DIRECTEMAR, 274 diver accidents were recorded at salmon farming sites between 2004 and 2026, of which 49 ended in the worker's death. The Ecoceanos Centre, citing its director Juan Carlos Cárdenas, cites 90 workers killed in activities linked to the salmon farming industry over the last twelve years (2013–2026), most of them under subcontracting. In January 2026 alone there were seven deaths: among them, Manuel Esteban Matus Caamaño, 29, who died on 8 January diving at the "Martita" site run by Australis Mar near Melinka, Aysén region, as a subcontractor for DM Services; and the sinking of the catamaran "Koñimó I" on 28 January in the Reloncaví fjord, with 6 crew members dead, none wearing a life jacket.

That's not a minor detail for anyone thinking about the international route: the years of work in Chile that form the basis of your dive history take place in a sector with this documented accident rate. Choosing your employer and contractor carefully during those years — not just thinking about racking up hours as fast as possible — is part of building the path properly, not a secondary detail.

Source: Ecoceanos, March 2026

Where to find the rest of the information

This post covers the full route from the Chilean licence to international saturation, but each stage has its own guide on the site with more detail: for the step-by-step on the licence and training in Chile, how to become a commercial diver and the sister post in this series how to become a commercial diver in Chile; for sourced wages in Chile, how much a commercial diver earns in Chile; for where to study in Chile with the detail on each centre, where to study commercial diving in Chile; for real vacancies, jobs; for the sector's companies, companies; and for the kit you'll need at each stage, equipment.