What certificates go on a yacht CV, and which need expiry dates?

I read the certificate block before I read your work history. On a green CV it is the only section that tells me whether you can legally stand on my deck tomorrow. Get it right and the rest of the page gets read. Get it wrong and it does not. I built SeaPapers, so read this knowing that, though everything below applies just as well if you write your CV in Word.

The order a captain reads them in

Put them in this order. It is not aesthetic, it is the order I check.

1. STCW Basic Safety Training. One line, with issue and expiry dates, at the top of the block. This is the gate. Without it you cannot work on a commercial yacht, so it goes first and it goes on page one.

Definition: STCW Basic Safety Training is the five module safety course every commercial yacht crew member must hold: Personal Survival Techniques, Fire Prevention and Fire Fighting, Elementary First Aid, Personal Safety and Social Responsibilities, and Proficiency in Designated Security Duties or Security Awareness. It typically takes five days.

2. ENG1 medical certificate, with its expiry. Two years for most seafarers, one year for seafarers aged 16 to 18, issued by an MCA approved doctor (UKSA, seen 2026-08-18). If your ENG1 is in date, that line is doing more work for you than any sentence in your profile.

3. Department tickets, most useful first for the job you are actually applying for.

Deck: RYA Powerboat Level 2, which is a two day practical course and a common entry requirement for deck roles, running roughly 199 to 325 pounds depending on provider (Solent Boat Training, seen 2026-08-18). Efficient Deck Hand, an MCA approved five day seamanship course that must be held for 18 months before an Officer of the Watch ticket under 3000GT, around 750 pounds residential at UKSA (seen 2026-08-18). Then Yachtmaster, tender driving, PWC, jet ski instructor, dive tickets.

Interior: food safety or hygiene level 2, silver service, barista, wine and cocktail courses, floristry, beauty and massage qualifications.

Galley: your culinary qualification, food safety level 2 or 3, HACCP, allergen training, and any ship's cook certificate if you hold one.

Engineering: AEC, MEOL, Y ratings, small vessel engineering tickets, and any manufacturer specific training.

4. Other useful lines. A driving licence with the categories. A second language with an honest level. A skipper's ticket from home waters. One line each.

Which ones need dates, and how to write them

Everything that has an expiry gets both dates. Everything that does not gets the year it was issued.

The two that matter most:

• STCW Personal Survival Techniques and Fire Prevention and Fire Fighting must be revalidated every five years, and a certificate valid to a given date lets you join a vessel up to that expiry (seaemploy.com, seen 2026-08-18).
• ENG1 runs two years, or one year if you are 16 to 18 (Join Yachting fact bank, Aug 2026).

Write dates unambiguously and identically down the whole page. Use the month in words. "STCW Basic Safety Training, issued 14 March 2024, valid to 14 March 2029" cannot be misread by a French purser, an American captain and a South African crew agent, and it will be read by all three. Never write 03/04/2024, which means two different days depending on who is holding the page.

There is one 2026 detail worth knowing. IMO Resolution MSC.560(108), adopted in May 2024, rewrote the Personal Safety and Social Responsibilities module to include mandatory training on preventing and responding to sexual assault, harassment and bullying on board. It applies to training and revalidation from 1 January 2026, and does not force early renewal of certificates issued before that date (SAFETY4SEA, seen 2026-08-18). If you trained in 2026 or later, your PSSR covers it. Nobody expects you to say so on your CV.

A certificate without a date reads to me as a certificate you do not hold. That sentence is the whole point of this page. When I see "STCW" sitting alone on a line, I assume one of three things: you did it years ago and it has lapsed, you have not checked, or you are hoping I will not ask. All three cost you the call, and all three are usually wrong, because most of the time the crew member simply forgot to type the date.

What to leave off

Space on a yacht CV is the scarcest thing you own. Two pages, and the certificate block is competing with your vessels for the good half of page one.

Leave off unrelated land qualifications. A forklift licence, a retail health and safety module, a customer service certificate from a call centre, an online marketing course. None of them is embarrassing. They are simply not what I am checking for, and every line of them pushes something I need further down.

Leave off a land first aid certificate when you already hold STCW, because Elementary First Aid is inside it. Leave off school certificates once you have any work history. Leave off anything you started and did not finish. And leave off the "certificate of attendance" from a weekend course that awarded no qualification.

The exception is transferable trade evidence. If you were a qualified electrician, plumber, carpenter or chef ashore, list it. That is not a land certificate cluttering the page, that is the reason a chief engineer or a head chef will look at you twice.

From the bridge: The strongest green CV I read last season had four certificates on it. STCW, ENG1, Powerboat Level 2 and a food hygiene ticket, all dated. It beat a CV with eleven certificates and no dates on any of them, because I could act on one page and not the other.

How SeaPapers renders them

Since I built it, here is what the editor actually does with this, and you can judge it against the advice above.

Certificates are a structured field, not a paragraph you type. Each entry takes the name, the issuing school, the issue date and the expiry date, and the editor renders them in one consistent block in the same place on every template, in the order set out on this page. Because the expiry is real data rather than text, the same dates feed your document folio, where you can see what runs out when.

The editor is free to use. A Pro tier covers clean PDF export, and reads the type and expiry off a certificate you upload so you are not typing dates twice.

Do this now

• Find your STCW and ENG1 certificates and write both dates down exactly as printed.
• Rewrite every certificate line in one format, month spelled out, issue and expiry.
• Delete every land certificate that is not trade evidence.
• Move the whole block onto page one, under your details and above work history.

Next, get the papers themselves somewhere you can send in one link: where to store your STCW and ENG1. Then check the whole thing still fits two pages. If you are choosing between paid templates and a builder, I compared them in SeaPapers vs SuperYachtResume.

Build the certificate block properly in the SeaPapers editor.