Grooming of deck Cadets – 12

The defining Moment!

The MN cadets – deck, engine, electrical eventually get groomed – many reflect the styles and the qualities of their mentors picked up along the way to becoming a watch standing officer and eventually the Master in command.

The international regulatory bodies, industry regulations, the trading patterns and the economic cycles of booms and recessions largely define the Cadets’ shaping – add a portion of their own initiatives in that. But does the industry get the officers that was intended? No matter how much one may argue the answer is a flat NO! The reason being the career itself being full of extra ordinary numbers of variables.

Can one search for a defining moment then? Indeed can …. Take a number of samples from across the world and you will find very interesting defining moments in the Cadets’ lives, the most frequent ones being…

• Shear survival moments – learning, adopting in order to survive in the current situations
• Opportunistic viewpoints
• Career or family decision moments
• Financial goals in personal lives
• Not coping up with the rigorous of the given trade type and switching over
• Not coping up with the academical demands
• Criminalization of the seafaring career by popular shore based trends
• Family demands – spousal demands
• Having no choice – certain trade type simply getting washed of
• Careers being taken over by other mediocre – cheaper workforces
• Having to work with low standard crews and teams
• Security issues – piracy – exposures to war zones and having no special protection of recognition
• Peer pressure – peer trends on mass scales
• … and rarely – occasionally a small number succeeding in having a trade of their choice, having a planned career-path to master the skills and actually doing so.

Consequently in this centuries old career, in spite of pumping in thousands of Cadet level entrants – there are only a few hundred highly skilled industry experts who at any moments call can operate the MN ships at the highest levels even when there is no quality demand or even when the wages are down …

Safe sailings!