Page 15: of Marine News Magazine (October 2020)

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vessel is a challenge by itself. But doing to reduce the chance of transmission materially impacted your overall this under the constraints introduced of the virus. We purchased a barrel of business to date? by COVID-19 has made it particu- It is, indeed, an interesting time. locally produced hand sanitizer, which larly challenging. However, our team Halter Marine had a well-established we gave out to employees as well as has leveraged technology to the fullest COVID protocol in place before I placed spray bottles at all building en- extent we can and we have improved started. In March, we created a CO- trances. Every night we have a crew go our processes to minimize the impacts VID-response team of executives and through all our facilities and fog the of COVID. We, along with our Navy managers. Immediately, this team im- work areas with antiviral mist. These and Coast Guard teammates are work- plemented a number of initiatives to and other measures such as travel re- ing side-by-side to overcome the ad- protect our workforce, customers and strictions and social distancing helped verse impacts of COVID, protect our partners. Some of the things we are us keep our numbers incredibly low workforce and customers and ensure doing include temperature checks at through the ? rst half of the year. As we we continue to make progress in spite our entrances and workspace changes moved into summer, we experienced of these many challenges.

Of course, strengthening and in- creasing our skilled labor force for the

PSC is both a blessing and a challenge.

That’s why we teamed up with the

Mississippi Gulf Coast Community

College to create our apprenticeship program. It offers training in the craft labor ? elds of welding, ship ? tting, pipe ? tting, pipe welding and electri- cal. It is designed in three components: on-the-job training, classroom train- ing and a progressive wage increase as participants reach set milestones. Ten students are enrolled in each of the ? ve disciplines for a total of 50 apprentic- es. We are off to a very good start.

They are following a maritime tech- nology curriculum approved by the

Department of Labor and the Missis- sippi Community College Board. The curriculum is comprised of 10 to 12 classes in support of their craft, plus management/leadership classes. I’m very excited to see this ? rst class of apprentices. Future shipyard leaders often begin their careers through ap- prentice programs, so we likely now have a future vice president or even a

CEO in this class.

You took over as Halter Marine’s

CEO at an interesting time, to say the least. You mentioned CO-

VID-19’s impacts on the PSC pro- gram, but how has the pandemic 15 www.marinelink.com MN