Commercial Diver Certification in Egypt: IMCA, ADCI & What to Look For

Commercial diving is a regulated trade, and divers progress through recognised tiers of competence rather than a single qualification. The entry level for most offshore and inshore work is surface-supplied diving, often written as SSDE (surface-supplied diving equipment), where the diver breathes gas piped from the surface and stays connected by an umbilical. Above that sit higher tiers that exist across the industry for deeper or more specialised work.

Beyond air diving, the industry recognises mixed-gas diving and, at the top end, saturation diving, where divers live under pressure for extended periods to reach great depths. Separate from the depth tiers, there are supervisory qualifications for the people who run the dive, and inspection or NDT tiers for divers trained to carry out underwater testing and survey work to a documented standard.

Almancy's own diving is in the air and surface-supplied range to 50 metres. We do not run saturation operations; where a project needs capability beyond our diver range, such as deep ROV survey, we bring in specialist partners rather than overstate what we operate in-house.

IMCA, the International Marine Contractors Association, is the leading industry body for offshore, marine, and underwater engineering contractors. It develops widely used guidance, competence frameworks, and good-practice documents that shape how diving and marine operations are run around the world. Being an IMCA member means a company has joined that association and aligns its work with IMCA guidance.

Here is the key teaching point, and it is one many tender documents get wrong: IMCA membership is a membership and a form of industry representation. It is not an accreditation, a certification, or an individual diver's licence. IMCA publishes a competence-assurance scheme that companies use to demonstrate their people are competent, but the membership itself is affiliation, not a stamp of approval issued to a diver or a company.

So when a contractor says it is an IMCA member, that is meaningful and worth having — it signals alignment with recognised international practice. But it should never be described as being accredited or certified by IMCA, because that is not what membership is.

ADCI is the Association of Diving Contractors International, a body rooted in North America that sets consensus standards for commercial diving operations. Its best-known output is the ADCI Consensus Standards for Commercial Diving and Underwater Operations, a detailed document covering diver training, equipment, supervision, and safe practice that many contractors work to.

Like IMCA, ADCI is an association whose member companies commit to working in line with its standards. The phrase 'ADCI certification' is used in the industry, but it is most accurate to think of it as membership of an association whose consensus standards a company adopts, rather than a single certificate issued to a diver. The strength of ADCI for a client is that a member contractor is signalling it builds its operations around a recognised, published standard.

Almancy is an ADCI member (since 2012). We describe it precisely as membership, and we apply the consensus standards to how our operations are planned and run.

IMCA and ADCI grew up in different parts of the world and are both well respected. IMCA has its roots in the North Sea and the international offshore sector, and its guidance is prevalent across Europe, the Middle East, West Africa, and Asia-Pacific. ADCI is rooted in the United States and the Gulf of Mexico, and is the dominant reference for much of North American commercial diving.

In practice the two are complementary rather than competing. Many serious contractors are members of both, applying IMCA guidance and the ADCI consensus standards together so their operations satisfy clients from either tradition. Neither replaces the other, and holding both is a sign of a contractor that works to recognised international practice across markets.

For work in Egypt and the Suez Canal, this matters. Operations in the canal waters are carried out under Suez Canal Authority rules, and the SCA accepts IMCA, ADCI, and other equivalent recognised certifications. That means a contractor aligned with both bodies is well placed to satisfy the recognition expected for diving in the canal corridor and Egyptian ports.

When you assess a diving contractor, look past individual diver cards to the company-level credentials, because those tell you how the whole operation is run. The strongest signal is an internationally recognised management-system trio: ISO 9001 for quality, ISO 14001 for environmental management, and ISO 45001 for occupational health and safety. These are independently certified and show the company runs documented, audited systems rather than working ad hoc.

On top of the ISO certifications, membership of IMCA and ADCI shows alignment with international diving practice and consensus standards. For underwater welding and steel repair work, the company should weld to a recognised code such as the AWS D3.6 standard for underwater welding. And for every job, the contractor should hold valid permits for the location and keep documented evidence that the specific divers assigned are competent for the scope.

Taken together, these credentials are what separate a properly governed contractor from an informal dive crew. A serious company can show you the certificates, name the standards it works to, and produce the competence records behind its people.

Almancy was founded in 2008 and has delivered more than 500 projects over 18-plus years with zero lost-time incidents. We hold ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015, and ISO 45001:2018 certifications (achieved in 2020), so our quality, environmental, and safety management systems are independently certified and audited. We are an IMCA member (since 2015) and an ADCI member (since 2012) — memberships, stated precisely, not accreditations.

Our divers carry out surface-supplied diving to 50 metres; we do not operate saturation diving, and we arrange ROV survey through specialist partners when a job calls for it. Our underwater welding and steel-repair work follows AWS D3.6 welding standards. We do not run a dive school or certify divers ourselves — we are a contractor that employs certified divers and holds the company-level credentials above.

Based at Port Tawfiq in Suez, on the Suez Canal, Almancy works under Suez Canal Authority rules and serves the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and ports across Egypt. The combination of certified management systems, recognised memberships, and a Suez base is what lets us meet the recognition that diving in Egyptian and canal waters expects.