What happens during an assessment?

We talk to Captain Mark Bull FNI, a navigation assessor with many years’ experience, about what goes on during an assessment and what he is looking for.

Why do we need navigation assessments?
When we review all the activities and operations that are carried out onboard ship, the single most important one is navigation. Despite this, it has been allowed to lose some of its importance – 50% of all accidents involve navigation in some way. This is because nobody has been looking at it consistently and, sometimes, nobody has been providing support for the people actually doing the navigation.

A navigation assessment is not just about what happens onboard! As assessors, we are looking at the complete spectrum, starting with the regulations and company policies that are designed to make going to sea safer right through to observing what the officers onboard are doing and how well they are doing it.

As assessors, we favour an holistic approach. An assessor is not just looking for nonconformities with procedures; they want to find out if the procedures are clear and easy to follow. Assessors should also be providing training and mentoring, helping navigating officers improve their own skills. We’re not looking to find blame, but to assist and motivate to help everyone improve.

Who should carry out a navigation assessment?
The person who does the navigation assessment should have either held command themselves, or have been a pilot, so they can understand in-depth the things that go through a Master’s mind. After all, it’s the Master who is driving the navigation of the ship as a whole. The assessor needs to be understanding in an empathetic way – and they need to be able to work with and help the captain as much as the junior officers.

What goes on during a navigation assessment
The ideal navigation assessment takes place over the course of a voyage, starting and finishing in port. This allows the assessor to watch preparations for sea, sailing with a pilot onboard, carrying out close navigation in a river or estuary, coastal navigation, ocean navigation and then the entry back into port again. We observe everything that happens, although the navigating officer does receive the lion’s share of our attention.

Essentially, all you’re going to see is somebody from outside the ship arrive on the bridge and then remain present in the background. It is not the type of assessment that comes with a formal interview. Rather, the assessor will observe what goes on, and only very occasionally at the end of the watch will they come and ask questions. There is no need to do anything at all differently to how you would usually do it – the whole point is to observe how things are usually conducted on board ship.

What sort of things are you looking for?

• Are the regulations clear and understood?
• Are the company’s procedures clear and easy to follow, and are they fit for purpose?
• Are crew members following these procedures – and if not, why not?

Assessors can help the navigating officer a great deal by identifying differences between what the procedures technically require, and what they are actually meant to do in practice. New technology in particular has brought about a whole series of challenges, which are not helped by grafting old methods onto new models.

For example, companies often issue very strict procedures to safeguard position fixing, but get it completely wrong. An ECDIS screen is relatively small compared to a paper chart, so it is essential that we keep it clean of unnecessary text and data. That means ECDIS must be used in a dynamic way, and responsibility shifts to each officer understanding what they are looking at, and what settings are enabled and disabled, rather than having all settings switched on all the time. The assessor can feed this type of issue back to the company and get those procedures changed for the better.

As well as feeding observations back to the company, an assessor can talk to officers and help them develop their own skills. Some of the traditional ideas still hold true – such as using leading marks and visual references when coming in to port – but they may not have been included in standard training.

Another strong point of the assessment process is that it gives people the opportunity to ask questions and check their own understanding of how things work. Because the assessors are, or have been captains or pilots themselves, anassessment gives the captain of the vessel the chance to speak in private to a fellow captain. It offers a valuable opportunity to ask questions that they might have been unable to ask before, and maybe solve a doubt or two in so doing

What does the assessor get out of it?
Personally speaking, I have learnt a lot from people onboard a vessel being assessed. Many junior officers have now moved beyond the point where they are starting to become familiar with their ship’s ECDIS, and are using many of the additional facilities that it has to offer. These keen second mates have really shown me how to use the ECDIS. Even after the assessment is complete, a lot of companies come back to me and pass on useful information like this, so the learning gets shared across the wider fleet and industry. I’ve met some marvellous people on the courses and the ships – and am still in contact with some of them years later.