Job Responsibilities
As my responsibilities in my current job do not match my job
description I shall need to digress to my previous job. My
responsibilities through my first ten years with my original
employer included hull form development, stability analyses,
weight control, space arrangement and utilization, extensive
technical writing, reporting and preparation of ship operating
manuals. I had meaningful experience with tasks I could become
very involved with during those first ten years. By and large,
the last six years with my last employer, and the past two years
at my current company have seen little more than short-fuse,
quick-turnaround ??fire alarm?? type jobs that kept the company in
survival mode with little recognition or reward.
|
Job Requirements
There are few clear educational or hiring requirements that will
guarantee you your choice of job or career path in the marine
industry. My current employer often advertises to hire people
with Master's, Bachelor's, or Associates degrees, or even high
school diplomas, for a given job depending on whether the
candidate has other relevant experience. Also, my employer
generally heavily favors people with a military background in
offering positions. I??ve witnessed far more peers leaving this
industry through layoff and early retirement than leading a full
career through retirement age.
In addition to the volatility of the industry itself, employers
tend to be extremely capricious in defining position
requirements while at the same time being rigidly inflexible.
Ultimately, as with many types of employment, your chances of
scoring a job depends on who you know more than on what you
know. In the marine field, they also seem to depend on who you
ARE. If you come from a well-heeled family and have
boating/sailing experience, or have a relative in the industry
(preferably who owns a boatyard or design firm) your
opportunities are far more abundant than someone with the
highest quality education. I??ve known of many naval
architectural positions held by mechanical engineers, industrial
designers, even car stylists. Generally, naval architecture as
a position seems to be a stepping-stone, leading to higher-
level, higher-stress and higher-aggravation positions with only
a slight increase in compensation for the ??advance??.
|
Uppers
If you can find a job, it's better than living on the street.
|
Downers
This is a very limited field with extremely few employment
opportunities. The commercial and military marine fields are
especially volatile. Employment in the military arena is
largely dependent on the major defense contractors' ability to
garner the occasional huge government contract, while commercial
work largely follows the whims of the economy and regulations
that force design modifications and new construction. Indeed,
the pleasure craft field seems to offer the most stable
employment environment but is also subject to economic whims,
and new job openings are extremely rare. Contract and temporary
work comprises a large percentage of the employment
opportunities, but one must be willing to continually relocate
nationally or even internationally for such jobs.
The industry is very quick to founder in poor economies and very
slow to recover. After 15 years with my previous employer, I
was unemployed for more than a year following a layoff. My
current job being the punishing, unforgiving experience that it
is, I??ve continued to seek more meaningful employment consistent
with my talents for more than three years. I strongly suspect
that my next job will not be in the field of naval
architecture. Looking back, I cannot fathom what possessed me
to enter this field, apart from love of the marine environment,
the desire to design a variety of pleasure and commercial
vessels and to live near the water. Very few of the people I??ve
worked with over the years seem to share these sentiments, and
both of my employers' workplaces, being in dingy urban locations
are as far removed from a marine environment as is imaginable.
|
Lifestyle
This job has allowed me little to no time for family or social life. This is
one reason I am seeking a career move. Surely the contract/temp situations
described above would seem not to be amenable to those concerned with raising a
family or building community.
|
Compensation
Generally, hard work seems to be its own reward for naval
architects and marine engineers. Compared with other
engineering fields, compensation in the marine industry tends to
run very low, with benefits to match. U.S. government jobs
(i.e., Navy, Coast Guard, etc.) have historically been
exceptional to this rule, but even in this case, vacation,
health care, etc. seem to have been compromised in recent
years. I cannot speak from experience regarding the yacht and
pleasure craft field. I can, however, unequivocally vouch that
through the past 19 years I??ve witnessed my former employer
shrink from well over a thousand employees to a couple of
hundred or so, that the commercial and military markets have
likewise become far more competitive and restrictive in the
U.S. Employers know that their workers have few alternatives
for employment and therefore have no incentive to pay
competitive salaries. Try to find work in a location where
living costs are low, and housing is cheap. You will never make
a living otherwise.
|
Advice to Jobseekers
If a lucrative or rewarding career is what you seek, the marine
industry in the United States is not where you want to pursue
it. This industry has for years been experiencing a brain drain
in the U.S. due to layoffs, poor working environments and lack
of opportunities. My own supervisor has, for example, cited a
former naval architecture colleague who now sells insurance and
who has not returned to the marine field. Meanwhile, as
American employers seem dumbfounded over this development,
significant marine industry innovations have been made in
Australia and New Zealand as well as many of the western
European nations and Japan. Anyone considering a naval
architecture/marine engineering career needs to think globally,
both for opportunities and for humane working conditions and
environments. If you wish to relocate to one of the above
countries this could be the career for you.
|
|
