Want Your Land Job Application to Stand Out? Do This First

If you're getting ready to apply for jobs on land, there is something you need to understand before you start sending out your resume. The person reading your application may have very little understanding of what you do onboard. Most people know what a cruise ship is. They know there are guests onboard on holiday, restaurants, entertainment, shore excursions, shops and hundreds of crew working behind the scenes. But knowing what a cruise ship is and understanding how one operates as a workplace are two very different things.  

Even someone working within hospitality or travel may have no idea what your particular shipboard position involves, the responsibilities you hold, the skills you use to do your job or the level at which you operate.

And that matters when you're applying for a job on land.

The purpose of ship-to-shore translation isn't to make your experience sound better. It's to make its relevance visible.

Translation isn't taking "I did this onboard" and dressing it up in impressive corporate language.

Your experience already exists. Your skills already exist. Your results already exist.

The problem is that their relevance may only be obvious to someone who does understand the cruise industry and working onboard.

When you look at your own resume, you already know what sits behind your job title. You know what you're responsible for, what your working day involves, the problems you solve and what you've had to become good at to do your job successfully.

A land-based recruiter doesn't have any of that background information.

And if they're screening a large number of applications, they're unlikely to stop and research what your shipboard position means or try to work out how your experience might fit their vacancy. If they can't see the relevance quickly enough, your application may simply not make it through that first stage.

That's why learning how to translate your shipboard experience matters, particularly if the job you're applying for isn't an obvious land-based equivalent of the one you're doing now.

So, what does ship-to-shore translation mean?

Before we go any further, it's worth separating ship-to-shore translation from something else you'll need to do when applying for jobs: tailoring your resume.

Tailoring is deciding which parts of your experience are relevant to the particular job you're applying for. You may do twenty different things in your current position onboard, but that doesn't mean all twenty belong on every resume you send. You want to bring forward the experience, skills and achievements that are most relevant to what that particular employer is looking for. 

Ship-to-shore translation is different.

Ship-to-shore translation is taking something you did onboard and expressing what it involved in terms that someone with zero understanding of cruise ship operations can comprehend.

Let's take a Guest Services Officer as an example.
They might write on their resume:
Assisted with embarkation and disembarkation.

Every crew member reads that and knows what they're talking about.
A land-based recruiter might read it and think:
Okay. You helped people get on and off the ship.

Even if we improve it to:

Assisted with the embarkation and disembarkation of 5,000 guests within a two-hour turnaround window.

That's more impressive, but it still hasn't really been translated. We've added scale, but the recruiter still doesn't know what assisted with required from this person.

That's where we need to get underneath the ship terminology.
What were they doing during disembarkation?

Potentially: managing guest flow, communicating time-sensitive information, resolving documentation or account issues that could prevent departure, coordinating with other departments, responding to last-minute problems and directing large volumes of people through a tightly scheduled process. Exactly what belongs there will depend on what that particular Guest Services Officer was responsible for, but those are the details we need to uncover.

Because that's the translation.

We're taking:
Assisted with embarkation and disembarkation, and turning it into something where a recruiter who has never worked on a cruise ship can go:

Ohhhh. You were part of coordinating the movement of thousands of customers through a time-critical operation, while dealing with the issues that could disrupt that process. Now they understand the professional capability underneath the ship term.

You haven't changed what you did. You haven't embellished it or dressed it up in impressive corporate language. You've made what you did understandable to someone who doesn't speak ships.

The purpose of ship-to-shore translation isn't to make your experience sound better. It's to make its relevance visible.

And hopefully, from that example, you can see how easily good shipboard experience can be overlooked during a land-based recruitment process.

You may be completely capable of doing the job you're applying for. You may have years of experience that demonstrate exactly the skills they're looking for. But if the person screening your application can't understand what you've done, they can't be expected to make those connections for you.  

And in many cases, you won't get the opportunity to explain it later.

Your resume and cover letter have to get you through that first gate before you ever reach an interview. If the relevance of your experience isn't clear at that point, the recruiter may simply move on to someone whose experience they can understand more easily.  

That's why ship-to-shore translation needs to happen before you start applying, not when you're sitting in an interview trying to explain what your shipboard career involved.

Your resume isn't the only place you'll need to translate yourself

Your resume may be where ship-to-shore translation becomes most obvious, but it won't be the only place you need it.

It will show up in your cover letters, your LinkedIn profile, conversations with recruiters, networking and eventually your interviews. Any time you're communicating your shipboard experience to someone outside the cruise industry, you need to think about whether what you're saying makes sense without the shipboard knowledge you automatically bring to it.

Even something as simple as being asked in an interview to explain your current role can require translation. You don't want to give an answer that makes perfect sense to another crew member but leaves the person sitting opposite you trying to work out what half of it means.

And the further the role you're applying for moves away from the obvious land-based equivalent of what you do onboard, the more important this becomes. You're no longer relying on the employer to recognise your job title or industry. You need them to understand the capabilities and experience sitting underneath it.

Give yourself the best chance of being understood 

Moving from ships to land is already a big transition. You're looking at jobs in a different working environment, potentially exploring industries you've never worked in before and learning how land-based recruitment works at the same time.

So don't make the process harder by assuming employers will automatically understand the career you're bringing with you.

Before you start applying, take some time to look at how you've described your shipboard experience. If someone had never stepped onboard a cruise ship, would they understand what you did? Would they understand the level of responsibility involved? And, most importantly, would they be able to see why that experience could be valuable to them?

Learning the rules of land-based job applications - how resumes are read, how experience needs to be communicated and how to make your relevance clear will make the whole process easier to navigate and give your applications a much better chance of getting through that first gate.

You've already done the work that created the experience.
Now you need to make sure the person reading your application can see it.
You may not be underqualified. You may be under-translated.