Welcome to the Maritime Skills Alliance

The Maritime Skills Alliance designs and promotes qualifications and apprenticeships for the UK’s maritime sector. We have developed a suite of interlocking standards and qualifications – MSQs, “Maritime Studies Qualifications” - which enable employees to progress both within their specialism and between sectors.

You can find a complete and regularly updated list of all our Units and Qualifications on the Qualifications page.

What do we do? We:

develop qualifications and apprenticeships which suit the needs of the sector
maintain a suite of National Occupational Standards
work to secure a good range of high quality training provision across the country
champion skills matters for the maritime sector
work with a wide range of other bodies across the UK, especially national governments and their agencies, to further our aims

You can sign up for monthly Newsletter in the box to the right. Our June 2018 Newsletter is here.

The MSA is not-for-profit (a Company Limited by Guarantee - company number 7939255), funded by its members.

Latest news

“Inspiring the Future Mariner” conference, 14 May 2018

We were delighted to work with Trinity House in organising this conference, which asked whether everything we do together to attract talented school children to the sector is enough, and what else we could do. We had some great speakers, and a good discussion, and terrific hospitality, as ever, from Trinity House.

Click on the link for Averil Macdonald's slides (1.0MB) and Cath Longhurst's slides (5.5MB).

Colleagues agreed that we need better coordination, and that Maritime UK should take the lead.

Click on the link for the Conference report (3 pages).

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