Just 8 Hours of Your Vacation Is All You Need to Start Planning Your Exit From Ships - Here's How

Want to Leave Ships? Here's What 8 Hours of Your Vacation Could Help You Figure Out If you've decided that you want to leave ships, one of the best opportunities you have to start preparing for that transition is your vacation. Not the first week you get home. Probably not the second either. After months onboard, you need time to sleep properly, see the people you've missed, enjoy being able to decide what you want to do with your day and generally come back to life again. But once you've had that time, there is an opportunity sitting in front of you that is very easy to waste. You have time away from the ship. When you're onboard, you can have every intention of working on your future. You tell yourself you'll research jobs after work, update your resume on a port day or spend your afternoon free time figuring out what qualifications you might need. And sometimes you will. But even when you manage to find a couple of free hours, you're still onboard. Your head is still in ship life. You've worked that morning, you're working again that evening, somebody needs something from you, plans change, you're tired, or you simply don't want to spend the few hours you have to yourself thinking about your career.

Vacation gives you a completely different kind of time.

Once you've rested and settled back into life on land, you can sit down for two hours without having to report for duty afterwards. You can research something properly, make phone calls, speak to people working in industries you're interested in, look at jobs in the country where you want to live, compare salaries, investigate courses or simply give yourself enough uninterrupted time to figure out what the hell you might actually want to do next.

And you don't need to spend your vacation doing this every day.

Choose one morning a week. Give it two hours. If you're home for four weeks, that's eight hours you've spent properly concentrating on your transition. If you're home for eight weeks, that's sixteen.

Think about how much you could find out or get done in that amount of focused time.

The difficulty is that vacation disappears incredibly quickly.

You finish your contract telling yourself that you'll sort things out when you get home. Then you get home and need a couple of weeks to recover. There are people to see, things you've been wanting to do, perhaps somewhere you want to travel, and suddenly you're looking at the calendar and realising you'll be packing your suitcase again in two weeks.

So, you decide you'll work on it onboard.
Ship life takes over.
Then you'll do it on your next vacation.
And another contract passes.

If you already know you want to leave ships, repeatedly putting off preparing for it doesn't stop you wanting to leave. It just means you're no more prepared to do it than you were six months ago..

That can eventually leave you in a difficult position. You might continue signing contracts because you still haven't figured out what else you could do or how you could afford to leave. Or you reach the point where you've simply had enough, decide you can't do another contract and leave without having given yourself enough time to prepare properly for what happens afterwards.

This is why using some of your vacation matters. You're not trying to turn your time off into another job or spend your entire vacation planning your future. You're giving yourself dedicated time to start creating an alternative while you still have the security of your shipboard career behind you.

One of my favourite sayings is:
Nothing changes if nothing changes.

Knowing you want a different life isn't what creates it. At some point, something has to move from I'm going to do that to I've started doing it.

So, use this vacation to change something.
Not everything. Something.

What that something should be depends entirely on where you are in your transition. Someone who has no idea what they want to do after ships shouldn't be spending their vacation worrying about when to start applying for jobs. And someone who knows their next contract will be their last shouldn't still be casually browsing careers wondering what looks interesting.

Work out where you are first, and use your time on the things that matter at that stage.

1. I Know I Want to Leave Ships, but I Don't Know What I Want to Do Next

Your job during this vacation is to start figuring out what you're moving towards.

You don't need to come home with the name of your future employer and a start date. But you do need to start investigating what kind of land life you want, what your shipboard experience could allow you to do and which career directions are genuinely worth exploring.

This is your discovery stage.

• What do you actually want your life on land to look like? Before searching job titles, think about the life the job needs to fit into. Where do you want to live? What kind of working hours would work for you? What do you need to earn? What matters to you now that perhaps didn't matter when you first went to sea?
• What are you bringing with you from ships? Look beyond your job title and start identifying what you've actually learned to do. Think about the responsibilities you've held, the problems you solve, the people you work with, the results you're responsible for and the environments you've learned to operate in.
• Where could those two things meet? Start researching actual jobs and industries rather than trying to invent your next career in your head. Look at vacancies, read job descriptions, compare salaries and notice which roles keep catching your attention. You don't have to choose one yet. The aim is to leave your vacation with two or three directions that are worth investigating further. 

2. I Know What I Want to Do, but I Don't Know When I'm Leaving

You've already done some of the discovery work. You have a direction; what you don't yet have is a departure plan.

This is where your vacation can be used to find out exactly what it will take to get from your current shipboard career into whatever you've decided comes next. That could involve money, qualifications, additional skills, job-market research or simply understanding how much preparation needs to happen before leaving becomes realistic.

This is your transition-planning stage.

Three questions can help you start turning that direction into an actual plan:

• What do I already have, and what am I still missing? Look at the jobs or direction you're interested in and compare their requirements with what you already bring from ships. The gap might be smaller than you think, or you might discover there are one or two things worth working on before you leave.
• What needs to happen financially before I can leave? Work out what your first few months on land could realistically cost, particularly if you won't move directly into another job. Once you have an actual number rather than I need to save some money, you can start deciding how many more contracts you may need.
• What can I start doing now? Some things are much easier to do while you're still earning and working onboard. A course can be completed, money can be saved, software can be learned, contacts can be made and an industry can be researched before you ever hand in your notice. Your transition plan should help you use your remaining contracts to prepare for leaving them.

You might start this vacation without knowing when you're leaving and finish it with a much better idea of what needs to happen before you can.

3. I Know What I Want to Do, and My Next Contract Will Be My Last

Now there's a deadline.
Anything you can organise while you're on vacation is something you won't be trying to organise during your final contract, when you're working onboard and your attention is divided between doing your current job and preparing to leave it.

Your resume, LinkedIn profile, job-search strategy, finances, professional connections and practical plans for returning to land all become much more important at this stage.

This is your getting-ready-to-leave stage.

If this is you, download our free guide 7 Things You Must Know Before You Leave Ships. We've put together the seven areas we recommend working through before you finish your final contract, so you can use your remaining time onboard to prepare for the move back to land.

Before You Go Back Onboard

However long you have left on vacation, choose the stage you're in and give yourself some time to work on it. You might spend two hours researching careers and come away with three possibilities you hadn't considered before. You might finally calculate how much money you need before leaving. You might realise that one more contract would give you enough time to complete a qualification and build the savings you need.

That is progress.

Your vacation doesn't need to produce your entire life-after-ships plan. It just needs to leave you a little more prepared than you were when you signed off.

Then, when you pack your suitcase and head back for another contract, you're not simply returning to ships hoping that somehow you'll figure out how to leave them later. You've started.

 Nothing changes if nothing changes. This vacation, change something.