With her maiden voyage just around the corner, over the next month we’ll be introducing you to our colleagues, ship and shore, who have been working hard to get Queen Anne and her crew ready to set sail.
Did you know? With existing crew moving over to Queen Anne from Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, and Queen Mary 2, there’s over 800 new crew joining the Cunard fleet.
In the second story in our people series, we learn more about some of the shoreside teams responsible for recruiting, training, and welcoming these crew to the Cunard family. If you missed our first story, hear from the onboard HR Team supporting the crew who will be working and living on board Queen Anne.
Recruiting, training, and onboarding. What’s involved?
- Our Fleet People Operations Team works with Cunard to decide how many of each role we’d need to hire. In this case, hiring crew to work on board Queen Anne and backfill roles across the Cunard fleet. There’s a mix of experienced and ‘new to sea’ crew on board Queen Anne.
- The Global Talent Partner Team communicate these requirements to the Global Talent Partners (GTPs) – third parties we work with across the globe, to source and train new colleagues.
- Our Resourcing Team works with our GTPs to source the right number and calibre of people.
- The Rotations Team plan when these people are needed to join the ship. This is planned in stages so as not to have too many new to sea colleagues joining a ship at any one time.
- Our Learning Team works with Cunard’s Guest Experience Teams and the GTPs to design and deliver training to candidates ready for their role before they join the ship. The Learning team also train, and quality assure the GTP trainers, to enable them to train future programmes.
- Fleet Travel organise airline contracts, flight manifests, issue airline tickets, and organise transfers & hotels to get our crew safely to the ship.
- The Training Compliance Team work through all the training compliance requirements, scheduling training and validating certification ahead of the crew members leaving home to join the ship.
In 2023 we increased our Cunard GTP Training programme, adding two new training centres in Bali and Jakarta to the existing centre in Manila. Bespoke seven-day training programmes were created for crew joining the Restaurant and Housekeeping teams, with the training schedules created around the dates that colleagues would be joining a ship.
The centres need to be fitted out too, with restaurant and stateroom set ups, so training can be practical and mirror the work crew will be undertaking on board.
Caren Kruger, Learning & Development Officer, Queen Anne, worked with Cunard Guest’s Experience teams to develop the programmes, and travelled to the new centres to deliver the ‘train the trainer’ and initial sessions. So far, over 60 candidates have completed the training!
Here’s Caren and some of the crew taking part in the training programme:
Queen Anne on LinkedIn – Follow, post, like, and share! #CUN4RD
In the run up to Queen Anne’s maiden voyage, make sure you’re following Cunard on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date on her journey home and coverage of the events during inaugurals week. From her handover to Cunard on 19 April and her arrival into Southampton on 27 April, to her setting sail on 3 May – feel free to post, like, and share, and help us to spread the word about Cunard’s newest Queen!