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Five great communication apps for seafarers

Five great communication apps for seafarers

Going to sea means time away from friends and family. It can mean long periods of time without internet/email access and even longer periods of time without a phone call home. Calling or texting home from a mobile can be incredibly costly, but the cost of data worldwide is coming down all the time. When you do get an internet connection it’s incredibly important to spend some time catching up with friends and family so we’ve rounded up our...

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Four factors that influence your reading skills

Four factors that influence your reading skills

Many of us take reading for granted, but around 5-million adults in the UK are illiterate, meaning they have reading and writing levels below what would be expected of an 11-year-old. Reading and writing aren’t just important skills for work, they are key to living a fulfilled life. For adults, and particularly seafarers, it can be very difficult to improve those skills if they are lacking, partly because of stigma, but mainly because it’s...

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Struggle with maths? Your attitude could be the answer

Struggle with maths? Your attitude could be the answer

We all need maths. It doesn’t matter if you need to know the safe working load of a strop, the density of bunkers, or the correct change at the supermarket; if you don’t have a solid grip on numeracy you will struggle with life. If maths is so important why do so many people struggle? The key to understanding maths could be more to do with the right attitude than anything else.

A negative attitude towards maths is all too common here in the...

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Six ways to boost your personal productivity

Six ways to boost your personal productivity

There are only 24 hours in a day and ideally, you should spend eight of those asleep. By the time you’ve done a day’s work, enjoyed some down time, exercised, spent time with family, and had three meals there isn’t much time left for anything else. When you take on a distance learning course you need to squeeze in at least a few more hours a week that you can dedicate to your study time.

How can you find the time to fit studying in on...

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Why should we hire you? Interview techniques for seafarers

Why should we hire you? Interview techniques for seafarers

Whether you’re in the Merchant Navy or Royal Navy, working at sea or ashore you will likely have to go to a job interview at some point. No matter how many tickets or years of experience you have it’s highly unlikely you will get any job without going through some sort of interview. It’s not a perfect system, some fantastic employees interview badly, and some terrible employees are great at interviews, but for now, it’s the system we...

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