Carl Martin Faannessen from crewing agent Noatun Maritime calls for an urgent need to start changing the narrative about careers at sea.
Our industry is painting itself into a self-made corner. Why? Because we are not adept at marketing, in every sense of the word.
What other industry would:
To spell it out: in our eagerness to come across as well-meaning, caring, and utterly in tune with the zeitgeist we are making the career of seafaring unattractive. We talk about attracting and retaining generation this, generation that, millennials. The fact that we even buy into the concept of generation-this-that-or-the-other is telling: that someone born a year after someone else should be profoundly different is right up there with astrology.
We combine this with pleas for help to make seafaring attractive as a profession. It takes a special kind of mental contortion to land where we are. And yet, we are now in a corner we are busily painting ever smaller.
Where are the voices arguing the counter-narrative here?
We need to flip the script. We need to focus on the meaningful rewards and profound opportunities offered at sea. We need to highlight the countless stories of personal growth, the journeys to financial stability, the calm of the endless horizon, the team spirit built onboard, the immense scope for learning, the room to shift from ship to shore and back, and so much more.
Can we get on with this, please? Maybe make it a weekly column, where someone from the industry spends a page explaining how amazing it all is? As Bjørn Højgaard, CEO of Anglo-Eastern, once said: “I started off chipping rust.”
