Best MATE: Enhancing and Expanding Marine Technician Programs and Career Pathways

Summary: Offshore wind development is booming across the U.S. – and the globe; this massive expansion of the industry has created bottlenecks for materials, vessels, and trained maritime technicians to provide the capacity we need to survey and plan for offshore wind development. A ready and credentialed workforce of protected species observers, geophysicists, geotechnical engineers to plan, collect, and analyze site survey data programs is a key component of that capacity, and is a robust opportunity to target students from underrepresented communities to enter the ocean science and offshore wind workforces – and there is already a mariner and marine tech shortage today. Not many universities provide applied research degrees, though a handful of federal programs like the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Internship provide preliminary exposure and training in needed fields. The MATE program is intended to provide undergraduate students or recent graduates with skills in marine technology and expose those students to a wide range of technology and equipment. We propose the expansion of that program to provide additional training opportunities and apprenticeships on private vessels, and a career service program to align their education and training with the needs of the offshore wind industry. This initiative could facilitate partnerships with academic instructions, equity-driven organizations like Black Women in Evolution, Ecology, and Marine Science, SACNAS, and Black in Marine Science, federal workforce development programs, maritime academies, community colleges, and opportunities in the non-profit (Ocean Exploration Trust) and private sectors (offshore wind developers) to ensure a diverse cadre of ocean scientists are trained in the types of observations needed for offshore wind and enabled with the appropriate credentials. This initiative would also enhance pathway and federal support to ensure young mariners are able to access and obtain mariner credentials from the US Coast Guard through technical assistance for applications and expand the capacity of the MATE program to place marine techs in positions across sectors of the new blue economy. Over the next year, BOEM, BSEE, USCG, NSF, NOAA, and other relevant agencies, institutions, and private sector partners could participate in a workshop with UNOLS to establish the appropriate process and funding support to expand the MATE program, identify what coursework, skills training, and credentials are needed to provide skills needed for offshore wind surveys, and establish public-private partnerships and memoranda of understanding with offshore wind developers. In identifying what skills are needed for specific career pathways, MATE can provide specific mentorship experience to that end. Interagency coordination and public-private partnerships with offshore wind developers and survey companies supporting offshore wind development could provide enhanced exposure to career pathways for ocean scientists that also advance President Biden’s 30 GW by 2030 goal and help existing workforce programs in the Department of Energy focused on onshore wind stand up programs to meet the unique needs of the offshore environment.

Sector: Academia, Industry, Government, NGO
Organization: University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System
POC: Rennie Meyers, renme@orsted.com
Other Contacts: Doug Russell, doug@unols.org