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The business development team from The Isle of Wight College won the 2008 Learning and Skills Improvement Service STAR Award engaging employers category. Each year every STAR Award winner and highly commended nominee has access to up to £1,500 for personal and/or professional development – the STARlight fund. The team agreed to use their STARlight fund for a group development day with the United Kingdom Sailing Academy, sailing on a BT Global Challenge 67ft yacht named Albatross. As a challenger yacht all operations are carried out manually including hauling sails on to the deck from the locker, hoisting all sails, navigation and steering. The team has an extremely good working relationship with the team at UKSA who work with the college on delivering the Essential Marine Cookery Course, Management Courses and Welding and Engineering training. |
UKSA provided a captain and first mate for the day who were responsible for the safe management of the yacht and the team development activities for the day.
The business development team has two new members and felt that the group sailing activity would support the team interaction and group dynamics of their busy office environment. Within the group there was one non swimmer and a person who was very unsure about being on the water. All team members prepared something to bring for the team lunch on board.
Activities
Preparation of the boat, selecting and setting the sails and preparing the boat for a day on the water, took about an hour. Eight team members were needed to hoist the mainsail on the yacht and six to hoist the foresail. They also prepared a larger foresail, but this was never used due to the increasingly high wind speed. Members of the team took turns in helming the yacht from leaving the mooring until returning to the pontoon when the captain moored up due to the difficult conditions. The wind speed increased while they were out on the water and at the end of the day they were sailing in a force seven.
At the end of the sailing activity Malcolm Alder-smith, a Customer Liaison Officer within the team, prepared a four course dinner for the team as part of his CPD. He had never cooked in a galley before and he is part of the delivery team for the Essential Marine Cookery Course. Malcolm had this to say about the development day:
"Supplying a four course, 5* meal for 14 discerning customers on a 67’ ocean racing yacht would not be a straightforward task for many chefs. The opportunity to experience, first hand, cooking on a yacht this size proved to be invaluable for me. I deliver six day, Essential Marine Cookery training for United Kingdom Sailing Academy (UKSA) marine hospitality students four times a year and this was the first time I had worked on a yacht of this size.
"I found the experience very useful from the point of view of menu planning and provisioning the meal, storage of prepared ingredients, lack of cutlery and crockery onboard and serving so many people in a confined space, working from the confines of a small galley with limited cooking facilities."
Despite the extremely challenging weather conditions, sitting on deck in the rain, the team had a fabulous day on the yacht and thoroughly enjoyed the sailing activities, lunch and evening meal on board.
Additional comments made by team members about the development day include:
"Being a non-swimmer and not keen on the water, I was a little bit apprehensive about spending the day sailing aboard a yacht. I soon felt at ease after becoming involved in tasks with my team members. I felt very supported and encouraged by them and it became a thoroughly enjoyable experience for me. If I had the opportunity to do it again, I would do so without hesitation."
Khadine Morley
"All working together to get the sails up on deck and then clipping them onto the rigging and hauling them up was great for team building. It was a once-in- a-lifetime chance to be behind the wheel of a BT Challenge yacht and it was good to interact outside of the normal workplace environment."
Nicola Ward
"It was a great opportunity to learn something new together and see how well we worked as a team outside the work environment. We had two new members of staff with us so having us all literally in the same boat of having to learn something new really helped to integrate everyone into the team."
Phill Gardiner
