The Importance of Non-Technical Skills in the Maritime Education

In many high reliability organisations safe and effective crisis management is dependent on both, technical and non-technical skills. The importance of non-technical skills, such as leadership, teamwork, communication, stress management/personal limitations, decision making and situation awareness, is now being realised in addition to subject knowledge and technical expertise to deal with emergency situations. Response to escalating emergencies in large organisations and industries require co-ordination of actions, communications, and a high level of decision making under pressure. The significance of technical skills is accepted; the importance of non-technical skills is now being recognised. The need for the training and assessment of main non-technical skills of co-operation, leadership and management skills, situation awareness, and decision making in MET is to be established. The distinction between technical and non-technical skills is accepted in the aviation industry where European legislation now requires that pilots in multi-crewed cockpits are trained and assessed in technical and non-technical skills. Critical incident reporting has identified nontechnical skills to be major determinants of successful anaesthesia crisis management. Most literature in this subject has focused on assessment of knowledge and technical skills during anaesthesia simulation, nontechnical skills have become a recent area of interest for researchers and now a comprehensive and reliable nontechnical skills assessment tool called the Anaesthetists’ Non-Technical Skills (ANTS) has been developed. In commercial shipping individual companies like Maersk send their Chief Officers for a three day leadership course before promoting them to take the responsibility of the command of a ship, but there is no legislative requirement of such training. A review of the maritime accidents databases from UK, USA, Norway and Canada conducted by Professor Michael Barnett and others in 2006 confirms that human error is the main contributing factor in the maritime accidents. This study illustrates that major maritime accidents are not caused by technical problems but by non-technical skills failure. The Crew Resource Management (CRM) course has been developed to address the non-technical aspects of ship operations. The course contents are focused towards those skills assumed to be essential in assisting in the detections and management of errors in the crisis. Barnett et al (2006) think that one week’s course provided by a training college is not enough to fix the “problem employee”. A greater need is realised to follow up the training after effects, by seeing how effective it has been on board the vessel itself. A review of other safety related industries’ recent involvement towards non-technical skills training and assessment will be carried in this paper and a comparison will be made with current maritime education.