During the 2023 SMART4SEA Athens Forum, Mr. Johan Gustafsson, Chief Revenue Officer, Ocean Technologies Group, highlighted a robust system that ensures training can continue anytime and anywhere, adds value to people onboard.
Operational reliability is what we want to achieve and making sure that operations are safe and without accidents or incidents. But we need to focus on humans because they are actually powering the World Trade. It is all about our people; we need to have a holistic view of how technology impacts their future and shed our attention to new skills and competencies required.
What is more, we have noticed there is a lack of standards; nowadays, there are numerous standards from BIMCO, IMO etc but not a joint one, but we need to find that level of standards need for evaluation when we look upon the new future of shipping. It is like replacing the old equipment with modern equipment and keep on doing the same thing but expecting a different result. But if equipment is changed, then procedures should be different as well.
When we talk about new technologies, another challenge is the willingness to change. With all these solutions going live, we need to focus on the management of change. Every day, seafarers are faced with the increased pressure to deliver flawless operations onboard. However, when we look upon the pace of change, we need to also consider the technology factors that will impact the future and the human factor. In that regard, the pace of change has been rapidly increased. In the old days we could see new requirements coming from space with lots of time to prepare, but now we find more and more is decided at ‘best practice’ level from organisations such as OCIMF and is then expected to be enacted much quickly.
The seafarer of tomorrow
Seafarers need to be the best seafarer in terms of that old traditional handwork of managing a ship and at the same time to be a technology savvy when dealing with engines. With that in mind, what is needed from the seafarers of tomorrow to meet all challenges?
- We want all the old skills: technical competency good seamanship etc.
- We need and expect them to be resilient
- We want great leaders and managers (if officers)
- With the experience of the last couple of years we want emotional, empathetic councilor
- IT whizz to cope with all that digitization
- Critical thinker/problem solver
- Auto didact
So, how do we attract these highly specialist people and are we ready to pay the amount of money that they will demand to come onboard our ships?
Key considerations to move forward
#1 Making it mobile: Mobile devices increase opportunities to access and update information anytime any place anywhere. It’s very important to provide technology every time.
#2 Predicting learning needs: Overlaying the performance management system with seafarer competency and certification to predict training needs ahead of time.
#3 Going from generic to individual training: We don’t need any generic training anymore; we need individual training that is adopted to the individual because we have different needs and different gaps. This approach will focus on each seafarer to provide support for the competencies and skills needed. Also, training needs to be blended to include micro learning, simulation exercises, animations, or games because not everybody learns the same way.
Above article is a transcript from Mr. Johan Gustafsson’s presentation during the 2023 SMART4SEA Athens Forum with minor edits for clarification purposes.
Explore more by watching his video presentation herebelow
The views presented are only those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of SAFETY4SEA and are for information sharing and discussion purposes only.
