Improving Cadet Training: The Call for New Requirements Before Going to Sea

Andrew Craig-Bennett calls for new requirements before going to sea.

The need to recruit cadets is constant and many, but certainly not all, ship managers and ship owners have cadet recruitment and training programmes.

I hear rather often from friends at sea that they are concerned about the education that their cadets have received before they start their training. It would seem obvious that a good grasp of mathematics, physics, and chemistry is needed, because seafaring in each of its specializations is within the ‘STEM’ (science, engineering, technology, mathematics) group of subjects.

Much of cadet training is built on a knowledge of these subjects, but in reality many cadets are weak in maths, physics, and chemistry.

We have been much too lax about this. We have assumed that basic exam passes in English language, mathematics, physics, and chemistry mean what they say, and we have built cadet training in the classroom in shore establishments on these, without really checking that cadet recruits know their way around the ideas and are comfortable with them.

Unfortunately, it is easy for a cadet to conceal a weakness in, say, physics, and multiple-choice questions such as are commonly used tend to facilitate this.

All is well until a junior officer actually has to know about the black art of ship stability in real-time.

A cadet may be weak in chemistry, but again, the weakness does not disclose itself until he or she is confronted with, say, a fire in a container, or in a hold, or has to decide if an enclosed space is safe to enter.

These are real dangers. Yes, the IMO model courses are good, but they assume a level of school knowledge that may not be there.

The frequency with which this comes up in conversations makes me think that this isn’t confined to any particular nationality; it certainly isn’t universal but it is common.

I don’t mean the sort of mistakes that cadets have always made because they are unfamiliar with ships and the sea. I used to share an office with a man who as a first trip cadet had been asked by the Mate, hydrometer in hand, in the Suez Canal, to bring him a bucket of water, and came back with a bucket of fresh water. He went on to have a perfectly good career. It’s probably some time since a cadet was sent to ask the boatswain for some green oil for the starboard lamp, or to ask the chief engineer for the key to the keelson. I mean dangerous blank spots in knowledge.

As a young man, I handled a Lloyds Form salvage of a pocket container ship which had sailed on a very inadequate GM and as she burned fuel… Some years after that I had to deal with a coal-carrying ship where before starting to weld on a hatch cover the Mate had tested for gas in the wrong place. A man died. Much more recently on a big container ship I wanted to enter an enclosed space and the Mate came back with the wrong meter. We can all of us think of similar cases that have happened to us. These are all cases of people simply not understanding basic science – “school” science.

I think we can take it that the teaching of sciences in the schools that our cadets go to is not going to get better in less than geological time. So we, as an industry, have to do something.

Medical schools at universities sometimes offer a pre-med course to students who are promising but who lack a good enough grounding in basic science. Typically, this lasts a year, during which time the students’ weak spots are found and the blank spots filled in.

Maybe our industry should do the same, with mathematics, physics, chemistry, and basic IT skills. Time for a new IMO model course and a new requirement before going to sea.