Tag: training

After successful sessions at Marintec, we take our free Digital Integration Workshop to six locations this year – starting with the Asia Pacific Maritime 2012 and CMA Shipping 2012 shows in March.

How many officers need to be trained to use ECDIS safely? There’s no punch line because it’s actually a pretty serious question. For the last couple of years plenty of people have grappled with it and generally failed to come to a conclusion.

Something like a consensus is slowly emerging but there is a significant spread between the estimates we have been able to gather.

The Admiralty team recently returned from Shanghai, where the shipping community gathered for the largest ever Marintec exhibition. We took our ‘Are you ready for the ECDIS regulations?’ workshop to the show, running sessions simultaneously in English and Mandarin over three days.

Initially we had planned three sessions, but due to popular demand we added an extra one to the schedule. Over the course of the show around 100 maritime professionals attended the workshop; most attendees were ship managers keen to get more information about how to introduce digital navigation into the ships they manage.

Training navigators in the safe use of ECDIS remains a critical challenge ahead of the rolling compliance deadlines beginning in 2012. And though the effects of the amendments to the SOLAS Convention won’t be felt strongly for a few years yet, the issues for shipowners and managers encompass not just the scale and cost of compliance, but quality too.

It’s something Nautical Institute technical manager Harry Gale recently discovered for himself when he completed a Generic ECDIS training course with a private provider ECDIS Ltd.

If your job involved operation of critical systems and safety equipment you would probably expect to be trained before you first used them. You would presume too, that you wouldn’t have to take leave to do the training, given the benefits to both parties. And when it came to using the actual equipment, you’d doubtless assume that someone would give you enough handover to enable you to use the system safely.

That might be the case for workers ashore but it is clearly not always true for seafarers. In a recent study ‘New Shipboard Technology and Training Provision for Seafarers’, the Seafarers International Research Centre (SIRC) concludes that current practices in training and handover are in some cases inadequate and in others, simply non-existent.

Magsaysay Maritime Corporation was named the winner of the 2011 Training Award at the Lloyd’s List Global Awards by UKHO’s Rear Admiral Nick Lambert, at a glittering ceremony at London’s Hilton Park Lane hotel earlier this week.

Pictured L-R: Rear Admiral Nick Lambert, National Hydrographer, Admiralty, presenting the Training Award to Marlon Rono, President, Magsaysay Maritime Corporation, with the Awards host, journalist and presenter, Matthew Parris.

The judges said: “Magsaysay offered a persuasive account of sustained excellence in training seafarers and a welcome commitment to the families of its trainees.

Last week, the Lloyds List Asia Awards 2011 shortlist was announced, and Admiralty is once again sponsoring the training award. We’re also sponsoring the Global version too, for the third year running.

Nor-Shipping is fast becoming Nor-Offshore, not simply to reflect that sector’s promise while the shipping market skulks in the doldrums, but because Norway sees, in Brazil in particular, a new territory in which it can sell its expertise in deepwater, harsh environment oil drilling.

Shipping people don’t switch off – this affects you too. Not least because the oil in Brazil’s Campos and Santos basins will be a new source of increased crude shipments in the coming years, but because, as more than one speaker at the Agenda Offshore conference noted, both sectors face parallel challenges and convergence is to be expected as the issues of the energy business knock on to shipping.

The UKHO has teamed up with Neville Smith, freelance journalist and blogger, and former Deputy Editor of Lloyds List, to be special guest editor on our Future of Navigation blog, where he’ll be looking at some of the key issues the industry faces as it shifts to digital navigation. Here, Neville sets out some of the themes he’ll be exploring;

“Welcome to the first of a new series of blogs from the UK Hydrographic Office examining the issues and challenges around ECDIS and e-Navigation.

Following the success of our Future of Navigation events held earlier this year in Hamburg and Singapore, Admiralty took a fresh approach for the third event hosted in Athens in October.

'Ask the Experts' Q&A session

The ‘Admiralty Academy’ brought together delegates from over 50 shipping companies and maritime organisations in the region, and focused on delivering a ‘hands-on’ experience of Admiralty’s digital product portfolio.