Cross-pollination - Techs helping techs!

Cross-pollination - Techs helping techs!
During our team's time supporting oceanographic institutes and vessels across the globe only minimal international interaction has occurred between marine technicians with regard to improving expedition planning, support and delivery.

International scientific collaboration between institutes both onshore and offshore is fairly common and well established within the oceanographic community. However, this is not always the case for Marine Technicians and Science ROV staff who are usually assigned to a single institutes vessels or ROV and will spend most of their career in a single institute environment.

There is a number of Marine Technician orientated conferences that exist (INMARTECH/RVTECH) that aim to address this issue. From our experience, these events are usually attended by members of and institutes senior management or department heads and often focus on high-level topics and not the everyday technical challenges technician's encounter at the "coal face".

Marine Technicians rarely get the opportunity to attend these events as they are at sea supporting science or can't attend due to budget considerations.

This isolation can have negative repercussions for science support and many institutes we have supported adopt the "we've always done it this way why should we change?" approach even when a more obvious and robust solution is available and successfully utilised elsewhere in the community.

Being open to change and adopting new solutions to problems or approaching a task from a new angle can often save the parent institute money, resources and make tasks less intensive. Streamlining operations allow the marine technicians to focus on supporting the science and meeting and exceeding an expedition's objectives.

Our unique experience working alongside technicians and scientists from different nations in all the world's oceans have allowed us to collate the best operational models and delivery adopted by each institute.

These experiences cover the full breadth of expedition support and execution from expedition assessment and planning to the experience of the science party during the expedition - something often overlooked.

Research Vessel Services are able to supply Marine Technicians to work alongside your embarked technicians during an expedition.

In this role, our technicians will observe "day-to-day" science operations and report back on potential improvements as well as identifying team strengths and areas that are working well.

For this service we offer highly competitive day rates as each vessel, institute and ROV experience feeds back information and ideas into the community.

Sharing ideas, experiences and success as well as failures and mistakes is a way of improving science delivery. Ultimately each oceanographic institute's goal is to further the collective understanding of the world's oceans.