Oceanwide Expeditions has teamed up with the Polar Tourism Guiding Association (PTGA) as an Accredited Provider.
As a result, Oceanwide Expeditions will adopt the PTGA’s ISO accredited Workplace Based Assessment programme.
Oceanwide will be scheduling staff for the forthcoming PTGA Assessor training course, which teaches how to work with the assessment process and PTGA systems to make this a robust programme, designed specifically for the needs of Polar tourism and expedition cruise companies.
Expedition staff members who are new to the expedition industry will be trained and mentored within Oceanwides’s own programme but will be able to undertake PTGA assessments at work and earn industry qualifications through the third-party standards organisation.
Oceanwide said it had met all the Accredited Provider requirements with its mentor and training programme aimed at comprehensive staff development.
The PTGA was formed by a dedicated group of Polar professionals who had undertaken hundreds of Polar expeditions. The association offers an extensive assessment, and accreditation programme with 23 different syllabi of competency for use by individuals and companies.
It is a US-based not-for-profit, professional industry association providing standards assessment and certification for Polar and expedition operators, field staff, and guides who operate either on vessels or on land.
“We strive to instil the highest level of safety and competence in our membership, for the benefit of the industry, our guests and the remote wilderness we operate in” said PTGA President, Graham Charles.
“For PTGA, skills assessment is far more about why guides make certain choices and collecting a range of evidence of actual job performance to prove competency than simply sitting an on-line test or one-off check-list,” he added.
“In the end, professional guiding is about judgment, correct decision making, reliable performance and guest engagement and as a mentoring organisation it is our role to foster all these attributes in the guides we assess.”
