Marine Learning Systems, a provider of maritime training and assessment software solutions, has partnered with Carnival Corp to develop an application for mariner skills assessment.
This app, called SkillGrader, was designed to help standardise Carnival Corp’s training and assessment across the company’s fleet of 105 ships and nine brands. Prior to this, there were numerous different approaches to training, with hundreds of programmes, and a variety of fleet trainers and external training providers.
“We wanted to align and standardise our approach.” said John Allen, Carnival Corp’s Director of Maritime Professional Development. “No matter which ship you’re on, no matter which brand you’re on, the ships will all be equally as safe as each other. And they will be the safest ships you can sail on.”
As part of this initiative, Carnival Corpdesigned a performance-related training approach where crew are placed within targeted training programmes based on their assessment results, rather than assuming no prior knowledge and enrolling crew into every course.
This required developing a new technical system that could support consistent assessment of any officer, while onboard any ship.
SkillGrader enables a system using a tablet-based application that allows any trainer or supervisor to objectively and reliably assess employees. The application uses a binary grading scheme to reduce human bias that can lead to variation.
After an assessment, SkillGrader automatically analyses the data collected and delivers a comprehensive report on individual and team performance. The system also collates all submitted data to give reports that allow for analysis and comparison of skills across multiple departments, vessels and the entire organisation.
Murray Goldberg, Marine Learning Systems CEO, said, “Although technology has played a big role in improving and advancing the art of maritime training, skills assessment has remained largely the same. There is typically an expert assessor observing the skill, making notes and providing feedback.
“This leaves much to the discretion of the assessor. And while you can get great outcomes from this way of assessing, you can also get very poor outcomes. You need consistency, objectivity and standardisation in the process. SkillGrader helps provide the reliability that has been missing from skills assessment and gives operators new insight into crew competency,” he claimed.
