LR Opens Shanghai Training Center
Lloyd’s Register Asia opened a comprehensive foreign-funded maritime training center in Shanghai. The new Lloyd’s Register Maritime Institute (Shanghai) was created to provide a center of learning from where working surveyors and auditors can share their technical knowledge with China’s shipbuilders, owners and maritime students through specifically tailored seminars, lectures and training courses. In 2009, the Lloyd’s Register Group will move the headquarters of its marine division from London to Southampton, creating a central Lloyd's Register Maritime Institute in conjunction with the University of Southampton. With the opening of the satellite training center, in Shanghai, LR said it is the first Asian extension of that strategy.The Shanghai office, which is expected to be the first in a network of such facilities provided by Lloyd’s Register Asia in China and North Asia, will have the capacity to seat up to 50 “students” at each seminar, lecture or training course. It also will be used to deliver highly interactive specialist courses, in which enrollment is typically limited to 15 attendees. Many of the lectures and seminars will be presented in Mandarin. Recent surveys conducted by Lloyd’s Register’s Marine Training Services (MTS) have indicated that seminars on environmental regulations, technical risk management, hull design, noise and vibration, and shaft alignment will all be eagerly received by China’s maritime industry. The first two-hour seminar will be offered on the impact of environmental regulatory developments emerging from the July meeting of the Marine Environment Protection Committee under the International Maritime Organisation, including the new rules governing ballast water management on ships. The Shanghai-based MTS team, formed in 2005, has offered 12 public courses in Greater China so far this year, in addition to the 25 exclusive courses they presented to private shipyards and the extensive suite of seminars and lectures they made available on an ad-hoc basis.