Announcing the theme Maritime Jobs for Future Generations, Seafarers UK has this week launched its Seafarers Awareness Week 2016 campaign, with the focus on promoting maritime career opportunities, both at sea and ashore.
Seafarers Awareness Week 2016 takes place from June 20 to 26 throughout the UK. It aims to build on the success of last year’s awareness-raising campaign, which saw more than one hundred businesses and organisations support the annual initiative.
Seafarers Awareness Week provides a platform for events and activities around the UK, combining a host of local media opportunities, with industry and individuals working together to raise the profile of seafaring and maritime jobs at sea and ashore.
Commodore Barry Bryant, director general of Seafarers UK, tells Maritime CEO how the week has grown in prominence.
“Starting from small beginnings a few years ago, Seafarers Awareness Week was intended as a wake-up call to the Great British public to remind them that we are in fact still an important seafaring and island nation, and that our seafarers need their full support,” he recounts.
While that aim remains vitally important today, there’s now a more sophisticated annual focus, recently concentrating on the huge spectrum of challenging and rewarding careers available in the maritime industries both at sea and ashore.
The week is one of many initiatives that has seen Britain become far more coherent in its maritime offerings in recent years, something Bryant acknowledges.
“I believe that the overall concept of ‘UK Maritime’, as long-championed by Admiral Lord West and others, is becoming much better understood, partly as a result of our initiatives such as Seafarers Awareness Week and, latterly, government action with the UK Maritime Growth Study,” the commodore says.
“Maritime activity governs not only our history and world standing but our very way of life, and Seafarers UK believes that there can be few things more important than demanding its proper recognition and support,” he insists.
Launched last year, the UK Maritime Growth Study, is according to Bryant, “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to pull the many diverse demands of the defence, trade and fishing industries together in a holistic sense, based as much on people as on profit”.
