Stu, this is a proper bit of work. The longest-answer trick is one of those things everyone half-notices in mock papers but nobody fixes. Scoring 91% without opening a book tells you the test is measuring the wrong thing. Rewriting 550 answers and checking each against DWR 1997, the ACOPs and the DMAC guidance can't have been quick. Fixing the out-of-date guidance I've been bothered by something else too. So many exams only ask for 80%, and there's rarely a chance to go back and learn the 20% you got wrong. I'd assume that 20% matters. Otherwise, why would we test it? Then there's guessing. Perhaps another 20% of a pass is luck, or answers you half know and never check. That's one of the biggest flaws of online multiple choice. A score can't tell you whether someone knew the answer or just landed on it. The classroom is where things stick. You discuss a point, you get it wrong out loud, someone explains it, and you keep going until it makes sense. Online, we've swapped that for convenience. What does that say about how committed we are to competence? I'm not sure I have a tidy answer. Maybe the pass mark isn't the problem. Maybe it's what we do with the questions we miss.

@Stu Sutcliffe these books are similar the long watch came from the Control Room The Long Watch the broader, more personal supervisor’s handbook usable in diving but deliberately portable to other high-risk industries as a practical leadership field manual.

That is a fair and useful distinction, Stu. I probably framed it too much through the North Sea and the UK oil and gas outlook, when offshore is clearly much wider than that. I agree that the work is not simply disappearing. It is shifting between sectors, regions and types of activity. Wind, subsea inspection, survey, maintenance, construction and decommissioning all need capable people, and the international market changes the picture again. Your point about choosing the role first is really the practical heart of it. Build genuine competence for a defined job, then obtain the qualifications that job actually requires. That is far more sensible than treating tickets as a lottery purchase. Perhaps the real question for anyone starting out is not, “Will offshore exist in five years?” It is, “Which part of offshore do I want to be useful in, and which skills will still travel if the market changes?”

IMCA’s own numbers are telling it something awkward On the surface they can say things are improving LTIFR and TRIR are drifting down and the graphs look tidy yet in the same year fatalities more than double, line‑of‑fire dominates the injury picture again, and safety observations drop away That is not just “how the data turned out” it is a sign of how the system is set up The statistics package is built around hours, LTIFR, TRIR and FAR so the story that gets told is rate driven Leaders are nudged to chase smaller numbers rather than fewer people put in front of high‑energy hazards When four of seven fatalities can be reported without real detail it shows how limited the learning expectation really is and how easy IMCA is prepared to be with members who under‑share As an advisory body IMCA could shift this quite simply Start by leading with serious and fatal risk not with frequency rates Every fatality should carry a short, anonymised learning story what was being done, what failed, what has changed Use the banding data and line‑of‑fire trend to talk plainly about where the real risk lives and who is struggling, especially in the smaller contractor bands There is also a bigger structural thing in the background Most of the richer guidance and analysis sits behind member access That means the companies most in need of help often see the least of it, and the wider industry cannot easily challenge or learn from the same evidence For a body that wants to speak for the whole sector that is a built‑in weakness Perhaps the question IMCA has to consider is this Does it want to be mainly a keeper of benchmarks for paying members Or does it want to be a place where uncomfortable lessons about fatal risk are shared openly even when that makes some of those members uneasy

@Bob Bryce I have tried to give feedback to IMCA in the past but not even received an acknowledgement but Im a small fish not a registered member but it tells alot about how the system is closed rather than open.

The site seems to have some bugs cant create an account or register a position no dropdown options so thia may be a problem