Your first 100 jumps happen fast. AFF, coach jumps, the A-licence sign-offs, your first solo exits, your first group jumps. It's a blur of adrenaline and debrief videos and gear you don't fully understand yet. And somewhere in that blur, you're forming habits — about how you approach a jump, how you debrief it, and how carefully you track what's happening.
Those habits are surprisingly durable. The skydivers who build good ones early tend to carry them forward; those who don't often spend the next few hundred jumps quietly struggling with things that could have been addressed at jump 30.
Log the jump, not just the exit
The minimum viable logbook entry — date, jump number, location, gear — tells you almost nothing useful later. The jumps where you'd find that information valuable are exactly the ones where you were too rattled or too excited to write more at the time.
Make it a habit to record your dive plan, what you actually did compared to it, and one honest landing note. You don't need to write an essay. Three sentences is enough: what the plan was, what went differently, what you'll adjust. In a year, those three sentences will be far more useful than a blank entry with the date.
In Jump Logs, the notes field is free-text and unlimited. Use it honestly. A note like “broke off late, almost collided tracking” is uncomfortable to write but worth ten times more than “great jump” when you're trying to understand a pattern six months later.
Learn your gear before you need to
At the student stage, your gear is often provided by the dropzone or you're using borrowed equipment that you didn't choose. That changes fast once you get your licence, and many new skydivers buy their first rig without fully understanding what they own.
Before you buy — or as soon as you do — get your rigger to walk you through the equipment. Know your main canopy's wing loading (use the wing loading calculator), know when your AAD was last serviced, know your reserve's pack date. These are not advanced topics; they're the baseline every licensed skydiver should carry.
Log each piece of gear in your gear list and attach it to your jumps. When your rigger asks “how many jumps on that main?” the answer should take two seconds, not ten minutes of mental arithmetic.
Get coaching before you think you need it
New skydivers tend to seek coaching when something goes wrong. Experienced skydivers seek it proactively. The difference matters because a coach can identify developing problems long before they become incidents.
At jump 50, you probably have a handful of technique issues you're not aware of — a pull timing habit, a body position tendency, a canopy approach pattern — that feel completely normal to you because you haven't seen them from outside. A single coached jump can reveal all of them.
Book at least one coach jump per 25 jumps in your first hundred. It sounds like a lot, but at jump 100 you'll be better for it than someone who had the same number of jumps and no coaching.
Understand currency before you go out of it
USPA and most national governing bodies have currency requirements: a minimum number of jumps within a rolling window before you're considered current. At your licence level, that typically means a jump within the last 60–90 days and a minimum jump count within the last year.
What many new skydivers don't realise is that going out of currency early in your progression is a much bigger deal than going out of currency at jump 500. You have fewer deeply ingrained reflexes, and the gap matters more.
Jump Logs shows you how long ago your last logged jump was, right on the dashboard. Make it a habit to check before your jump day, not after.
Don't rush the next step
Jump 100 can feel like a milestone that unlocks everything — larger formations, more advanced disciplines, a smaller canopy. In some ways it does. In other ways it's still only the beginning.
The skydivers who struggle at jump 200 are usually the ones who spent jumps 50–100 chasing the next thing instead of consolidating the current one. Consistent, precise landings on your current canopy. Reliable pull altitude. A debrief habit that actually identifies what you'd do differently. These are worth more than a smaller canopy you're not ready for.
Your logbook, honestly kept, will tell you whether you're ready for the next step better than the jump number will.