Crew and certificates

FOR-2011-12-22-1523 — kvalifikasjonsforskriftenA seafarer shall hold a certificate for the position held on board, and the company shall ensure it. From 20 March 2025 Norwegian seafarers’ certificates are issued electronically, which changes how they arrive but not who is accountable for them being valid on the day.

The question a crewing officer actually has is not "which certificates expire this month". It is "which certificates expire while that person is at sea, on the rotation we have planned, in a position that requires them". Those are different lists, and only the second one prevents a sailing being stopped.

NoRemarks records the requirement on the position, not on the person: the company sets a baseline for a chief officer, a vessel may add to it — a DP certificate on a DP vessel — and may never take anything away. The effective requirement is what the screens read, and the horizon is computed against the planned rotation.

• Sign-on and sign-off with both ends counted. A period on board has a start and an end, and sea service is computed from them with both ends counted the way a service record does it. A person who is still embarked has no end date, and the product knows the difference.
• Requirement per position, overlaid per vessel. The company baseline says what a second engineer must hold. A vessel adds what its own operation requires. The overlay may only add — no vessel can quietly relieve a position of a statutory certificate.
• An expiry horizon that knows the rotation. The office view ranks certificates by whether they expire during a planned trip, not by date alone. A certificate expiring on day 19 of a 28-day trip is the one that matters.
• The muster, not a headcount. A muster shows who is here, who is missing, and who is standing at the wrong station. It reads the same embarkation records as the crew list, so a person cannot be mustered who was never signed on.
• Manning against the safe manning document. The manning board compares who is embarked against what the positions require, per shift, so a gap is visible before the vessel sails rather than after.
• Certificates filed with the document, not instead of it. An expiry date without the certificate behind it is a note. Each certificate carries the scanned document, its issuing authority and its number, and a superseded one is kept rather than overwritten.

• Crew list — who is on board, in which position, since when
• Certificates — per person, per position, with the document behind each
• Manning — coverage per shift against what the positions require
• Muster — present, missing, wrong station

The crew list is the first thing a rescue coordination centre asks for and the first thing that is out of date in most systems, because sign-off is a piece of office paperwork done on Monday for a Friday. Here the gangway signs a person off where the person actually leaves, and the crew list is right within the minute.

Personal data is kept to what a position and an emergency need. Everything sensitive lives in one place with its own access rule, and a person leaving the company can be erased without taking the ship’s statutory records with them.