I am a professional mariner gathering information to help build a program to improve maritime training with a focus on what the mariner wants. Having said that, I need help from this forum testing my hypotheses.
What subject(s) are needed most right now? What maritime training challenges have you experienced or heard about? What would you change about maritime training? How might we deliver more effective training?
Any feedback is much appreciated. If you are interested to discuss more, we can certainly connect. Thanks, all!
Biggest thing I’ve seen is inconsistency. For example I’ve heard Texas A&M has an extremely challenging, week-long firefighting course. Some places you’ll spend a couple hours discussing theory, extinguish maybe one fire, crawl around in the dark for a few minutes, and that’s it. Now this is of course a function of cost, but it applies to a number of classes I’ve taken.
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Great feedback! I hear ya with the inconsistencies…I’ve gone to a lot of different maritime training institutions and it seems everyone does it differently.
Chief Officers have been banging on for years in this company to go on a Dangerous Goods course.
They just sent a couple of shore managers on one.
Total lack of logic.
Thanks for the feedback and insight. It sounds like having a more consistent training structure in the industry would be helpful. Do you prefer more theory or hands-on training? Why?
Most Maritime training is ineffective and costly.
Also, it doesn’t pay well to be in this department so it’s usually reserved for lower to middle management shoreside employees. Very few people coming off vessels would take a pay cut to do this.
Most of these trainers/instructors have less experience and seatime than the students.
Most Mariners could care less - they view it as unnecessary, costly and time consuming. They would rather be using their time off with families or almost anything else other than training.
A lot of the training is implemented in knee jerk reaction, ie radar after the Mauvilla accident.
Most training is one size fits all, when you have a variety of ships, boats, towing vessels, passenger vessels etc.
There are over 5,000 towing vessels on the inland waterways. They have to test out on near coastal charting for a Steersman license and use charts of the North East where they will never operate they or go in real life. No brownwater classes or testing I have seen is very practical.
Most of the training done has to go through the cumbersome and bureaucratic processes of the NMC.
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