Happy New Year to all the Islander readers! It’s going to be an exciting year at Invisible Crew. In fact the last 3 months of ’17 have been very exciting, indeed! Since we launched our new brochure and website our service offer is now resonating pitch-perfect with our market, the Pocket Superyacht Owners.
But that’s not even the most exciting part!
The AHA Moment!
For the last 7 years I have been breaking my head over how we can train yachties to become truly professional Pocket Superyacht Crew. My biggest concern was that people would not want to pay for yet another course after they’ve done their Basic Safety and Yacht master courses. These are the only two certificates that are officially required to skipper a Pocket Superyacht and as important as they are, they don’t prepare you for the full extent of the job. An extremely multi-facetted job that requires an understanding and knowledge on:
• Owners: Who are they, how do they behave and communicate, what do they expect, how to represent their interests?
• Charters: What is the position of the charter brokers, how to work with them, how to offer great service on board, how to keep control of your guests, how to manage the Advance Provisioning Allowance.
• Deliveries: How to select and manage your delivery crew. What are your responsibilities, what are theirs. How to deal with conflict situations at sea.
• Maintenance: how to maintain engines, water-makers, hydraulics, pumps, rigging, sails, air-conditioning, plumbing, electrics…
• Yard planning and outside contractors: How to get correct and complete quotes, how to perform quality control.
• Budget management and expense reporting.
After subscribing to an online course myself, which covered a completely different subject but equally diverse and impossible to teach with a couple of classroom sessions, I had an AHA moment!
I discovered the power of e-learning and how it can bring across vast amounts of knowledge to those who are motivated to absorb it!
So I finally saw the solution to bringing all those points I just listed across, and much more, to students of any level.
Theory, Practice and Mindset.
Of course, if you say “any level” it implies that students must be able to gain practical experience. This is something I can offer through my network but more importantly, e-learning allows me to teach students how to set up their own network to gain experience.
Our maintenance module takes students through the combined maintenance lists of all the yachts we have worked with and describes every maintenance task on that list of all lists. Video material will support the theoretical content and make it easy for students to visualise how things work in practice.
E-learning allows students to process the content at their own pace, their own time, in their own space!
It also allows us the time to create a very holistic training. As working on yachts is not just a job, but a way of living, the right mindset is highly important too. Professional attitude, problem solving, crisis management, psychology on board,… Being conditioned to think in a certain way, to recognise patterns and to be made aware of potential emotional and psychological pitfalls have a great impact on the day to day life on board.
Trial and error or accelerated career?
It’s time we move away from having crew and owners paying the price (money and headache) of building a crew’s career through trial and error. And to my excitement, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. People want to come into the industry with a level of professionalism and accelerate their career! After a private post on my personal Facebook profile about this idea, the amount of positive reactions surprised me. Within days, 3 students signed up and as I am writing this I have calls scheduled with 3 others who want to learn more. We’re going to start with a maximum of only 6 students so we can follow them up closely. We need to bounce the content off on them so we can further fine tune it before taking on more students.
When this Islander edition is published we might be fully booked but if you are interested to sign up too or want to give me your input on this idea, feel free to email me: jens@invisiblecrew.com
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