Assessment on Mariner's Competency

Recently, maintenance of clean ocean is very important issue. One part of the issue strongly relates to the safe navigation of vessels. Most parts of safe navigation depend on the mariner's competencies. STCW was established to guarantee the sufficient mariner's competencies. However the code dose not indicate the each necessary competency clearly. Therefore, the understandings on STCW are not same among training institutes, and each training institute interprets them individually and executes them. As a result, it makes big differences among the institutes concerning training methods and contents and the assessment on mariner's competencies. The countries in EU have paid attention on this issue and the activities enhance the rational assessment of competencies through METNET. In order to execute the rational assessments, it is necessary to clarify the techniques being assessed. And it means the necessity to clarify the necessary techniques for safe navigation and to assess the competencies to achieve them, and then we can attain the objectives of STCW. In this paper, the necessary techniques for achievement of safe navigation are discussed and the methods of assessment of competencies are proposed. As we apply proposed assessment system, we can get the mariner's competency quantitatively and continuously through training period. Then we can know the trend of the competency that is the learning process. By clarifying the learning process of the techniques, we can decide the necessary training time to achieve the competencies. Furthermore, we can discuss the issues on conversion between training onboard and simulator used training by analysing the learning processes.