The MCA Is Making Your Training Record Book Digital Whether You're Ready or Not

The Complaint Behind This Change

Ask cadets on the same length of sea phase how many Training Record Book tasks they've had signed off, and you'll get wildly different answers — some report around 50 signatures, others closer to 36, through no fault of their own. The most common cause isn't laziness, it's structure: training a cadet properly isn't formally anyone's job on most ships. Good companies have policies for it; it's rarely mandatory, and a busy or uninterested officer can leave a cadet's book half-finished for an entire contract. On top of that, cadets report genuine confusion about what a report should even look like, and which officer's signature actually counts — some tasks need a specific ticket holder, others need countersigning by someone senior.

What's Actually Changing

MCA and the MNTB are replacing the paper Training Record Book with a cloud-based digital app, mandatory for cadets starting from the 2025/26 academic year. This isn't a cosmetic update — it's a structural response to exactly the sign-off problem above: a paper book can sit half-empty in a cabin for months with nobody noticing; a digital record makes gaps visible in real time, to the cadet, the training provider, and the company, before the sea phase ends rather than after.

What This Means in Practice

• Task completion becomes trackable as it happens, not discovered as a shortfall at the end of a phase — better for cadets who've been chasing signatures, harder to quietly under-deliver for a company that isn't training properly
• The old excuse of "I'll get it signed later" gets structurally harder — a live digital record is visible to your college and DSTO (Designated Shipboard Training Officer) throughout, not just at handover
• If you're starting a cadetship from 2025/26 onward, expect this from day one — check with your college exactly when your cohort transitions if you're mid-programme

Why This Matters Beyond Cadets

This is the same problem verified digital logging exists to solve at every rank, not just for cadets — inconsistent, hard-to-prove records that quietly cost people time and credibility later. The MCA moving cadets to a mandatory digital record is the regulator independently arriving at the same conclusion the Sea Time Log and Ship Handling Log were already built around: a record only has value if it's verifiable as it's created, not reconstructed from memory when someone finally asks for it.

Related Reading

• Cadet Sponsorship Guide — how the sponsorship side of a cadetship actually works
• The 160-Day Wait Nobody Warns You About — what happens later in your career when a sea time record isn't solid