Marine Learning Systems has partnered with Carnival Corporation to develop what it calls an innovative application for mariner skills assessment. 

The application, named SkillGrader, was designed to help standardize Carnival’s training and assessment across the company’s fleet of 105 ships and 9 brands, according to Marine Learning Systems.

Prior to its development, the company said, there were numerous different approaches to training, with hundreds of programs, and a variety of fleet trainers and external training providers.

“We wanted to align and standardize our approach.” said John Allen, Carnival’s director of maritime professional development. “No matter which ship you’re on, no matter which brand you’re on, the ships will all be equally safe. And they will be the safest ships you can sail on.”

As part of this initiative, Carnival designed a performance-related training approach where crew were to be placed within targeted training programs based on their assessment results, rather than assuming no prior knowledge and enrolling crew into every course. This required developing a new technical system that could support consistent assessment of any officer, while on-board any ship.

Marine Learning Systems said that SkillGrader has a tablet-based application that allows any trainer or supervisor to objectively and reliably assess employees. The application uses a binary grading scheme to reduce human bias that can lead to variation. After the assessment, SkillGrader automatically analyzes the data collected and delivers a comprehensive report on individual and team performance. They system also collates all submitted data to give reports that allow for analysis and comparison of skills across multiple departments, vessels and the entire organization.

According to Murray Goldberg, CEO of Marine Learning Systems, there is a need for consistency, objectivity and standardization in the assessment process. SkillGrader is designed to provide the reliability that he said has been missing from skills assessment and gives operators new insight into crew competency.