Lightship Chartering, leading freight consultancy and dry-bulk brokerage house, have
successfully launched an unparalleled trainee program for shipbrokers. The program,
Lightship Academy, is designed with a balanced mix of academic lecturing, group work
assignments and practical “on the job” training over a concentrated period of 9 months.
The key objective is to offer an efficient training and induction process for young talent who
want to join the naval freight business as brokers.
This year’s academy was kicked off with a 10-days induction session – “the bootcamp” - at
Glyfada outside of Athens on the 15th September. Here, the 10 trainees, selected from
different corners of the world, met for the first time to get intensive training on the maritime
transport markets in general and the brokerage role in particular. As summarised by
Lightship COO Kjell Johan Nordgard:
With reference to recent headlines around broker houses’ plans to increase their
focus on trainees, Lightship are pleased to announce that we have already launched
our Lightship Academy trainee program. For our academy program, we have
selected talent we believe have the potential to develop into good ship brokers. The
selection criteria have been focused on talent as the first priority and relevant
experience as second priority. The trainees therefore come with different
backgrounds, and with different levels of experience from the shipping industry –
from none whatsoever to a few years of academic and/or practical working
experience. The objective with the bootcamp is therefore twofold; to give the
trainees a common foundation and basic understanding of our business, and then –
just as importantly – to ensure the trainees establish a solid network between
themselves. They will need both the foundation and the network to complete the
rest of the academy program successfully.
After the bootcamp, the trainees were allocated to different Lightship offices where they
currently receive training through lectures, videos, self-study literature and group work
assignments. The training is organised across three dedicated modules; Brokerage
Processes and Tools, Trading Types, Analytics and Trading Strategies. Through these 3
modules, the trainees will build up good insight and practical exercise in key broker
activities like calculating total costs of voyages, comparing freight rates with Time Charter
Equivalents, identifying and qualifying vessels for different cargoes and freight routes,
reading and understanding contractual documents (Recaps, Charterparties, Bills of Lading,2
Notice of Readiness, Vessel Nominations,…) and a sound understanding the market forces
driving strategies for hedging and active position-taking for charterers, owners and
operators.
The 3 academic modules will continue until 15th December this year. Come January next
year, the trainees will be allocated as assistants to selected senior Lightship brokers and
participate actively in supporting activities like market data collection and analysis, PDA
screening, vessel identification and qualification (against cargoes). The Lightship Academy
class of 24 will then graduate 31st May next year, ready to join the maritime community
as shipbrokers. Sune Fladberg, Lightship CEO and partner, expects the Lightship Academy
to put a significant footprint on the recruitment and expertise building for the broker
community going forward.
The Lightship Academy is, with its training structure based on direct knowledge
transfer from experience brokers in a global setup, a quite unique concept for
targeted trainee education. There are other training systems and offerings
available in the market for young people who want to start a career in the shipping
sector, but few (if any) are as directly focused on fasttracking the broker education
as the Lightship Academy. The training in the academy is done by Lightship’s own
brokers and chartering operators, and the syllabus and methods are designed from
the outset to pass on the knowledge and methods gained and developed by our
own colleagues through years of experience over to the trainees in an effective and
efficient way. The material we have developed for this contains information and
methods you cannot read in teaching books or learn through university programs.
The only way to learn it, and to become good at it, is the hard way through
learning by doing. However, Lightship Academy takes the brunt of this learning
process, giving the graduates a flying start and a vantage point for quickly gaining
the experience and insight needed to offer excellent broker services to our clients.
In this vein, I also want to emphasize that we encourage women to apply to the
program. In Lightship, we believe in building strength through diversity, and our
industry could benefit largely from a better balance of genders.
The application process for next year’s intake to the Lightship Academy (starting
September 2024) will start in December 2023.
Do you wish to apply for Lightship Academy? Send your application to: Programmer@lightshipchartering.com Learn more about our application process here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lightship-chartering_lightship-academy-program-activity-7139990482452930563-ey59?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
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