ESVAGT trains more than any other Danish shipping company

Recruiting skilled employees is crucial for ensuring continued growth for the shipping company - so ESVAGT trains its own future mariners.

ESVAGT is a shipping company in continual development, as are many of the people that work there – both in the fleet and on land.

Nick Ørskov, Head of People & HR at ESVAGT, estimates that around 160 ESVAGT colleagues are currently under some form of training. 135 of these are ordinary ship assistants from training ships and sea training schools getting their education. This makes ESVAGT Denmark’s leading maritime trainer:

”We do it because we believe that the industry in general – and we in particular – have a future,” says Nick Ørskov:

“This future demands that we continually expand and top up with skilled and relevantly trained personnel. To do that, we need to take responsibility for training the people that we need. The ambitions for growth that we have as a shipping company cannot be fulfilled by advertising open positions – we need to train and form these sailors ourselves,” he says.

A career path

Our many ordinary ship assistants are often on courses that mean that they return to colleges for periods of time to continue their education and then emerge as able-bodied seamen. A number of them continue to study to become mechanics, engineers or navigators – and most of them return to ESVAGT sooner or later. The goal of the shipping company is to have at least 60 percent of them returning when they have finished their education or training. Actually, the proportion is much higher than that:

”We emphasise that people are not here just for the trainee period before going on to something else. When you are here, you grow and develop and if it is a career you want, then we would like to make it possible. Many of our ESVAGT colleagues have made a career in the shipping company,” says Nick Ørskov.

The gains are enormous both for the employee and for the company. The employee can grow and develop with each task and the shipping company can offer both attractive career opportunities and train people up from the very beginning:

”It is a huge advantage that we can hire people with ESVAGT experience who know about the ESVAGT standard,” says Nick Ørskov.

He is surprised that a relatively small shipping company like ESVAGT is the one that – by far – trains the most:

”We train the people that we need. We don’t know what other companies in this industry expect from the future but I would be surprised if we were the only company that will need sailors in the years to come,” he says.