If you want to work on a superyacht, the STCW certificate is the first thing every captain asks for. No STCW, no job. It is that simple. STCW stands for Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers, and it is the international safety qualification that proves you can handle yourself in a fire, an abandon-ship scenario, a man-overboard drill, and a basic first-aid situation. Every deckhand, stewardess, chef, engineer, and mate on a commercially registered yacht holds it. This guide walks green crew through exactly what STCW certification is, the STCW basic training modules you have to pass, what an STCW course costs in 2026, where to take it, how the ENG1 medical fits in, and how to turn all of it into a paying job on deck or in the interior.
I have watched hundreds of new crew walk the docks in Fort Lauderdale and Antibes with a fresh STCW certificate in a folder, not sure what to do next. The certificate opens the door. Knowing how to use it gets you hired. Let us go through the whole picture so you arrive at your first day of dayworking already ahead of the person standing next to you.
The moment you finish your STCW basic training, put your yacht CV where the people doing the hiring can see it. Create your free crew profile on Yacht Service Network and let captains and crew agents find you.
Create your free crew profileSTCW is an international convention adopted by the International Maritime Organization back in 1978 and heavily amended in Manila in 2010. Those Manila amendments are the reason the training you take today looks the way it does. The convention sets the minimum training every seafarer must complete before working on a commercial vessel, and yachts over 24 metres that carry a commercial registration fall squarely under it. Because the standard is international, an STCW certificate earned at a school in the UK is recognised by a captain in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, or the South Pacific. That portability is the whole point. You train once, and the paper works everywhere.
People shorten the name in a dozen ways. You will hear "STCW basic training," "STCW basic safety training," "the STCW 95," and "STCW 2010." For a new crew member in 2026, they all point to the same thing: a short course, usually five days, that bundles the core safety modules a first-time seafarer needs. When a job advert says "STCW required," this is what the captain means. Get this one course done and you have cleared the single biggest barrier between you and a yacht job.
It helps to understand what STCW is not. It is not a medical, it is not a licence to drive the boat, and it is not a specialist ticket for firefighting teams or fast-rescue-boat coxswains. Those are separate qualifications you may pick up later as you rank up. STCW basic training is the foundation everyone stands on, from the newest laundry stew to the chief officer.
The STCW course is not one exam. It is a set of short modules stacked into a single week. For years crew talked about "the four modules." Since the Manila amendments phased in, there are effectively five, because Proficiency in Security Awareness became a mandatory part of basic safety training for seafarers on commercial vessels. Most reputable schools now deliver all five together as one package, so when you book "STCW basic training" you get the complete set. Here is what each one covers.
This is the pool day, and it is the one crew remember. You learn how to abandon ship safely, how to jump from height wearing a lifejacket without hurting yourself, how to right an inverted liferaft, how to climb into it, and how to stay alive in the water while you wait for rescue. You will tread water, huddle for warmth, and practise helping a weaker swimmer. It is genuinely useful and genuinely tiring. If you cannot swim, tell the school before you book, because you need to be water confident to pass.
Fire at sea is the thing that keeps captains awake. In this module you learn the chemistry of fire, the classes of fire and which extinguisher matches which, and how to use breathing apparatus. The highlight is the burn-house exercise, where you crawl through a smoke-filled container in full kit and put out real flames as a team. You come out sweaty and smelling of smoke, and you understand for the first time why the crew safety briefing matters.
Basic life support, recovery position, CPR, dealing with bleeding, burns, shock, and choking. On a yacht you may be hours from a hospital, so the crew is the first responder. This module gives you the confidence to act in the first critical minutes rather than freeze. Chefs and stews use these skills as often as deck crew, so nobody gets to switch off during this one.
The classroom module. This covers emergency procedures, pollution prevention, working relationships on board, safe working practices, and your rights and responsibilities as a seafarer. It sounds dry, and parts of it are, but it is where you learn how a yacht actually runs as a workplace and why the chain of command exists. Pay attention here because a chunk of what a captain expects a green crew member to already know lives in this module.
The newest addition. This module teaches you about the International Ship and Port Facility Security code, recognising security threats, and your role in keeping the vessel secure in port and at anchor. It is a short module, often half a day, but it is now a required part of basic training, which is why the modern STCW course is a five-part package rather than the old four.
| Module | What you do | Typical time |
|---|---|---|
| Personal Survival Techniques | Pool work, liferaft drills, jumping in kit | 1 day |
| Fire Prevention and Fire Fighting | Extinguishers, breathing apparatus, burn house | 1.5 days |
| Elementary First Aid | CPR, bleeding, burns, recovery position | 1 day |
| Personal Safety and Social Responsibilities | Classroom: emergencies, pollution, life on board | 0.5 day |
| Proficiency in Security Awareness | ISPS code, threat recognition | 0.5 day |
Add those up and you land on roughly a five-day week. Some schools run it Monday to Friday in one block. Others split it across two weekends to suit people who are still working a shore job while they train. Either way you finish with the same certificate.
Do not wait until the certificate is in your hand. Build your profile during the course so you can start applying the day you pass. Post your yacht CV free and browse deckhand and stew jobs in one place.
Create your free crew profileThe honest answer is that the STCW course sits in the $1000 to $1500 range in 2026 depending on where you take it and the exchange rate on the day. That is the single biggest upfront cost of getting into yachting, so budget for it early. Prices moved up over the last two years with fuel, insurance, and instructor wages, so if you read an old blog quoting $795 treat it as out of date. Below is a realistic 2026 comparison by location. Costs are shown in the local currency crew usually pay in, with an approximate US dollar figure so you can compare like for like.
| Location | Example school | Typical price | Approx USD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fort Lauderdale, USA | Maritime Professional Training | $1,150 to $1,400 | $1,150 to $1,400 |
| Antibes, France | bluewater | 1,150 to 1,350 euro | $1,250 to $1,450 |
| Palma de Mallorca, Spain | Palma-based STCW providers | 1,100 to 1,300 euro | $1,200 to $1,400 |
| Southampton, UK | Flying Fish | 900 to 1,100 pound | $1,150 to $1,400 |
| Cowes, Isle of Wight, UK | UKSA | 950 to 1,150 pound | $1,200 to $1,450 |
A few things to watch when you compare prices. Check whether the quote includes all five modules or whether Proficiency in Security Awareness is sold as a separate add-on, because a cheap headline price sometimes hides an extra fee. Ask whether certificate issue and printing is included. Ask whether lunch and kit hire are included, since the fire module needs overalls and boots. And check the school is approved by a recognised flag administration, most commonly the UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency, because a certificate from an unapproved provider is worthless when a captain checks it.
One more budgeting note. The course fee is not the whole cost of getting job-ready. Add the ENG1 medical, travel to the training town, and four to eight weeks of living costs while you dayworking and hunt for a position. Realistically a new crew member should arrive with $4,000 to $6,000 of runway on top of the course fee. Yachting pays well once you are on, but the entry ramp costs money.
Location matters more than most new crew realise, and not because the training differs. The modules are standardised, so a certificate from Cowes is identical on paper to one from Fort Lauderdale. What differs is where you are standing the week you finish. The smart move is to train in a yachting hub so that the day you pass, you can walk the docks, hand out CVs, and start dayworking without buying another plane ticket.
The capital of American yachting and the winter base for a huge slice of the fleet. Maritime Professional Training, known to everyone as MPT, is the big name and runs STCW courses almost every week. Fort Lauderdale suits crew who want to work the Caribbean season and the US market. Remember you need to be legal to work, so sort your visa situation before you commit. The dock walking scene here is busy from October through spring.
The heart of the Mediterranean fleet. bluewater in Antibes is one of the best known crew training and placement houses in the industry, and training there drops you straight into the biggest dayworking market in the world during the spring build-up to the Med season. If you want to work European charter yachts, Antibes in March or April is the place to be standing with a fresh certificate.
Palma has grown into a genuine rival to Antibes, with a huge refit industry that generates constant dayworking through the winter and spring. Several STCW providers operate on the island, and the cost of living is a touch friendlier than the French Riviera, which stretches your runway further while you look for a permanent position.
Flying Fish in Southampton and UKSA on the Isle of Wight are two long-established schools that train a large share of British and Northern European crew. The UK is a sensible place to certify if you are already based there, want to combine STCW with other courses like the RYA Powerboat Level 2, and plan to travel south to a hub afterwards. Just remember the UK itself is not a dock-walking market, so factor in the trip to the Med or the Caribbean once you are qualified.
Whichever town you train in, captains scout crew online before they ever meet them on the dock. Browse deckhand and stew jobs and let hiring crew find you the moment you arrive.
Create your free crew profileHere is a detail that trips up crew a few years in. STCW basic training is not a lifetime certificate. Under the Manila amendments, two of the modules need refreshing every five years: Personal Survival Techniques and Fire Prevention and Fire Fighting. That makes sense, because these are the perishable physical skills you would rather not be practising for the first time in a real emergency. The classroom modules, first aid, personal safety, and security awareness, do not require the same periodic refresher for basic certification purposes.
The refresher is called STCW Updating or STCW Revalidation, and it is a short course, usually two days rather than the full five, because you are refreshing the survival and firefighting elements only. Expect to pay somewhere in the range of $400 to $700 for the revalidation package in 2026. You can prove your recent sea service to keep certain elements current, but most yacht crew simply take the updating course because it is quick and captains like to see the fresh dates. Do not let your STCW lapse right before a big job comes up, because a captain filling a last-minute slot will pick the candidate whose paperwork is clean and current over the one who needs a week off to re-sit a module.
Keep digital scans of all your certificates in a folder on your phone and in the cloud. Crew lose the original paper constantly, and a captain who asks for your STCW at ten at night before a dawn departure is not impressed when you cannot produce it. A tidy, current, easy-to-share certificate folder marks you as professional before you have picked up a mop.
New crew mix these up all the time, so let us be clear. STCW is a training certificate. The ENG1 medical is a fitness-to-work certificate. They are completely separate, issued by different people, for different reasons, and you need both to work on a commercial yacht.
The ENG1 medical is a seafarer medical examination carried out by a doctor approved by a flag state, most commonly an MCA-approved doctor for the UK register. The doctor checks your eyesight, hearing, blood pressure, general health, and colour vision, and they are checking whether you are fit to do safety-critical work at sea far from a hospital. It is not a difficult exam for a healthy young person, but it is not a formality either. Colour blindness, uncorrected poor vision, or certain medical conditions can result in restrictions or a fail, so if you have any concern, get the medical done early before you spend money on the STCW course.
The ENG1 medical cost in 2026 runs roughly $150 to $250 depending on the doctor and country, which makes it a small line item next to the STCW course. An ENG1 is typically valid for two years, sometimes less if the doctor notes a condition to review sooner. Because it expires faster than your STCW modules, the ENG1 is usually the certificate crew forget to renew. Diarise it.
| Feature | STCW basic training | ENG1 medical |
|---|---|---|
| What it proves | Safety training completed | Medically fit for sea |
| Who issues it | Approved maritime training school | Flag-approved doctor |
| Typical 2026 cost | $1,000 to $1,500 | $150 to $250 |
| How long it lasts | 5 years (survival and fire refresh) | Up to 2 years |
| Time to complete | 5 days | 1 appointment |
Do the ENG1 first if you have any doubt about passing it, and do the STCW course second. That order protects you from spending on training you cannot use. If you are fit and healthy, the order barely matters, but plenty of crew have found out the hard way that a colour-vision issue blocks deck work, so front-load the cheaper test.
The STCW certificate and the ENG1 get you legal. They do not get you hired. Captains and crew agents fill positions from a pile of candidates who all have those two things, so you need the rest of the package to stand out. Here is what separates the crew who land a job in two weeks from the ones still dock walking in two months.
A yacht CV is not a shore CV. It is one page, it has a clear headshot in a plain shirt against a plain background, and it leads with your certificates, your visa status, your availability, and any relevant experience. Captains skim CVs in seconds, so the layout has to be clean and the useful facts have to be near the top. List your STCW, your ENG1, your nationality and visas, your date of birth, and any tickets like a powerboat licence or a food-hygiene certificate. Keep hobbies short and relevant. A stew who freedives or a deckhand who has boat-handling experience gets a second look. For a deeper walkthrough of getting hired, read our guide on yacht crew jobs and how to get hired.
Every day you dayworking, ask the mate or the chief stew for a written reference or at least permission to list them as a contact. Green crew have no yacht experience, so the reference you earn from your third day of work on a 40 metre motor yacht is gold. It tells the next captain that a real crew member vouched for your attitude. Build a small stack of these before you chase a permanent job.
Dayworking is casual paid work on yachts by the day, usually cleaning, washing down, polishing, and helping the crew during a busy period or a refit. It pays roughly 100 to 150 euro or dollars a day depending on the market, and more importantly it is how you get seen. A captain who likes your work ethic on a daywork job is the captain who offers you a permanent green-crew slot when it opens. Treat every daywork day like an audition, because it is one. If you are starting with zero sea time, our article on how to get a yacht job with no experience lays out the daywork-to-permanent path in detail.
Yachting is a face-to-face industry with an online front door. Captains hire people they have met on the dock, people their crew recommend, and increasingly people they find in a crew database before they ever meet them. So you want to be physically present in a hub during the season build-up and digitally present where hiring crew search. Do both. Walk the docks in the morning and keep your online profile current so that a captain scrolling for a last-minute deckhand finds you at midnight.
A certificate in a folder does nothing until a captain sees your name. Post your yacht CV free, list your STCW and ENG1, and get found by the crew doing the hiring.
Create your free crew profileLet us put the whole path in order so you can see the road from where you are standing now to a signed contract. This is the sequence I give every new crew member who asks me where to start.
Step one, get your ENG1 medical. Book it early and cheap to confirm you are fit for sea before you spend on training. If there is a vision or health flag, you want to know now.
Step two, book and complete your STCW course. Choose a school in or near a yachting hub and do the full five-module basic training. Five days, and you walk out with the certificate that opens the whole industry.
Step three, build a proper yacht CV. One page, clean headshot, certificates and visas up top. Get it right once and reuse it for every application.
Step four, get to a hub for the season. Antibes and Palma for the Med build-up in spring, Fort Lauderdale for the Caribbean season in autumn. Be there when the boats are hiring, not a month after.
Step five, dayworking every day you can. Cash in hand, references in the bag, and your face in front of captains. This is where the permanent offers come from.
Step six, put yourself online where captains search. Keep a live crew profile so that the hires you cannot reach by walking the dock can still find you. Deck crew specifically should read our breakdown of yacht deckhand jobs and how to become a deckhand to understand what captains look for in a green deck candidate.
Follow those six steps in order and you compress what takes some crew three months into three or four weeks. The people who struggle usually skipped a step, most often the online profile or the daily dayworking, and then wondered why nobody called.
I see the same avoidable errors every season. Booking the cheapest unapproved course to save $100 and ending up with a certificate a captain rejects. Turning up to the pool day unable to swim and failing the survival module. Letting the ENG1 lapse and losing a job offer because the medical expired first. Doing the STCW course in a landlocked town far from any yacht and then spending the savings on a plane ticket to a hub anyway. And the biggest one, treating the certificate as the finish line instead of the starting line.
The certificate is the ticket to the stadium. It gets you through the gate. The job comes from everything you do after: the CV, the references, the dayworking, the attitude, and being findable. Green crew who understand that get hired fast. The ones who frame their STCW certificate and wait for the phone to ring stay unemployed.
Another quiet mistake is going silent online. Crew agents and captains build shortlists from searchable profiles. If your profile is thin, out of date, or missing your certificate dates, you are invisible to a whole channel of hiring that runs alongside the dock. Fill it out properly once and keep it current.
Hiring on your yacht? Search crew who already hold STCW and ENG1, filter by role and availability, and message candidates directly. Find qualified certified crew free on Yacht Service Network.
Create your free crew profileYes, for any commercially registered yacht, which is nearly all of the professional charter and private fleet over 24 metres. STCW basic training is a legal requirement, not a preference. A tiny number of small private vessels may operate under lighter rules, but you should assume every real yacht job requires it. No captain is going to sponsor a green crew member through the certificate, so get it before you apply.
Budget $1000 to $1500 for the full five-module basic training, depending on location and exchange rates. Fort Lauderdale, Antibes, Palma, and the UK all sit within that band. Watch for hidden add-ons like a separate security-awareness fee or certificate issue charges, and confirm the school is approved by a recognised flag administration before you pay.
No. The ENG1 medical is completely separate and is carried out by a flag-approved doctor, not the training school. It costs roughly $150 to $250, takes one appointment, and proves you are medically fit for sea. You need both the STCW certificate and a valid ENG1 to work, and the ENG1 usually expires first, so keep an eye on its two-year window.
About five days as a single block, covering all five modules. Some schools spread it across two weekends for people still working ashore. The revalidation course you take every five years is shorter, usually two days, because it refreshes only the survival and firefighting elements.
The Personal Survival Techniques and Fire Prevention and Fire Fighting modules need refreshing every five years through an STCW updating course, which costs roughly $400 to $700. The first aid, personal safety, and security modules do not require the same periodic refresher for basic certification. Keep your dates current, because captains filling last-minute slots pick candidates with clean paperwork.
Yes, this is exactly how most crew start. STCW plus an ENG1 plus a solid yacht CV plus dayworking in a hub is the standard entry route. Green crew get hired every season with zero prior sea time. The certificate makes you eligible, and the dayworking, references, and a live online profile turn eligibility into an offer. Read our guides on getting hired and starting with no experience to shortcut the process.
Take it in or near a yachting hub so you can start dock walking the day you finish. Fort Lauderdale suits the American and Caribbean market, Antibes and Palma suit the Mediterranean season, and the UK works if you are already based there and plan to travel south afterwards. The training is standardised, so choose the location that puts you closest to the boats when you qualify.
STCW certification is the front gate of a career that can take you around the world and pay well while it does it. Book your ENG1, complete your five-day STCW basic training at an approved school in a hub, build a clean one-page yacht CV, and get yourself dock walking and dayworking the moment the season starts. Do those things in order and you will not be dock walking for long.
The last piece is being findable. Captains and crew agents search for certified crew online before they ever meet them on the passerelle, so the day your STCW course finishes, make sure your name is where they are looking. Create your free crew profile, list your STCW and ENG1, and put yourself in front of the people doing the hiring.
You did the course. Now let the fleet find you. Create your free crew profile, post your yacht CV free, and browse deckhand and stew jobs on Yacht Service Network. It costs nothing and captains are searching right now.
Create your free crew profile