September 21, 2022 – As a part of their ongoing efforts to advance passenger and crew safety, Marine Learning Systems and BC Ferries have been working together to optimize SkillGrader, an innovative application for mariner skills assessment. The collaboration is taking the form of trials for pre-departure, arrival, and navigation assessment on-board.
Developed by Vancouver software company Marine Learning Systems, SkillGrader is an enterprise solution that helps vessel operators quickly and objectively assess the skills of officers and crew, both in teams and individually. It replaces subjective and cumbersome paper-based assessments with a digital solution that runs on both tablets and mobile devices. An instant report is generated for immediate debrief and coaching opportunities. It also presents all results and analytics through an on-demand dashboard for future reference, to support audits, and to help reveal organization-wide skill trends, gaps, and metrics for operational improvement.
In its quest to continually improve SkillGrader for maritime skill assessment, Marine Learning Systems sought the input of BC Ferries. BC Ferries is an ideal operator for such a collaboration due to their expertise in the field and more than decade-long partnership with Marine Learning Systems. The trial involves using SkillGrader to standardize on-board assessment of the execution of nautical standards and company safety protocols. BC Ferries’ input was instrumental in developing assessment forms targeting critical competencies, and in developing reports that provide insight at the trainee, management and board level. For training administrators, this creates a comprehensive feedback loop between training and performance, helping operators optimize training relevance and frequency, and target it to where it’s most needed.
“Our navigation assessments provide us with important insight into the ways that our teams are engaging with our policies. Standardizing the assessment process is critical to ensuring the fairness and accuracy of the data that we collect,” says Andrew Wetmore, BC Ferries’ Director of Nautical Standards. “Since we are looking to continuously improve standards within a highly skilled and knowledgeable group of professionals, the tools that we use to do this are critical to building an accurate picture of where we can focus our attention to address leading indicators and potential gaps.”
“We developed SkillGrader to improve safety and performance by measuring the core outcome of training in a sophisticated and objective way. This is a first-of-a-kind tool giving operators unprecedented insight into crew competency,” says Murray Goldberg, CEO of Marine Learning Systems. “BC Ferries’ approach to improving safety has been industry-leading, and we’re incredibly pleased to be working with them once again to further advance the state of maritime training and assessment technology.”
About BC Ferries
BC Ferries is one of the largest ferry operators in the world based on passengers transported annually and transportation infrastructure, and carried 17.9 million passengers and 8.5 million vehicles during the fiscal year ended March 31, 2022. BC Ferries provides frequent year-round ferry transportation services to the west coast of Canada on 25 routes, currently supported by 39 vessels and 47 terminals, and also manages other remote routes through contracts with independent operators.
Press Contact:
Peter Frankel
Marine Learning Systems
peter[@]marinels.com
+1(885) 362-7463