Transferring the knowledge
With every passing year, mentoring in the maritime industry becomes progressively more important, yet at the same time progressively more difficult, Murray Goldberg, CEO of Marine Learning Systems told MJ.
“Mentoring is irreplaceable in the transfer of experiential knowledge. It provides career guidance and support from those who have ‘been there and done that’. Mentoring can also be critical in helping young mariners and shoreside workers make informed career decisions and equally, in attracting young people to the profession, needed today more than ever.
“However, it has to be said that mentoring is best achieved in environments where protégées have access to a large number of potential mentors in a context where relationships can be long lived. Unfortunately crew sizes are smaller and maritime workers are more mobile than ever. This has made robust mentoring relationships progressively more difficult to achieve in the maritime industry.”
Recognizing this, a group of experienced mariners and shoreside workers came together to create a solution, the International Maritime Mentoring Community www.MaritimeMentors.com. The idea is that an online community of experienced mariners would be available, free of charge, to act as mentors to anyone working (or considering a career) in the maritime industry.
“The community has two basic functions, continued Mr Goldberg, “mentor matching and mentoring communications. In order to facilitate the matching of mentors to protégées, mentors sign up to the community and declare their areas of expertise, vessel types served on, geographical location, languages spoken, years of experience, and so on. When a protégée visits the community, they search the database to find a mentor who most closely matches their needs. The process can begin using the online mentoring groups and community discussion areas.
“The advantages of such a community are many. First, it is a central location where a protégée can browse hundreds of potential mentors to find one who most closely matches his or her needs. Second, it facilitates communication and long term relationships irrespective of physical location or temporal constraints. Also, it acts to create a large global community of people seeking and providing advice about the maritime industry.”
At the time of writing, there are hundreds mentors from 46 countries who collectively represent well over 4,000 years of experience in every aspect of the maritime industry. For example, 108 mentors have experience in deck department, 52 as engineers, and 47 with on-shore administration. Fourteen have experience with port security, 29 with vessel classification, 21 with vessel security, 82 with maritime training, and 17 with naval architecture:
“This is only a small sample of the resource”, concluded Mr Goldberg.
