Mustering a crew ready to undertake deep space missions is as high a priority as building Endeavour itself. 

The ISDC supports professional development with a variety of career options underpinned by the Academy, providing training in the technology, systems, procedures and protocols unique to Endeavour's mission.

Career Tracks

The complex systems aboard Endeavour require a well trained crew with a wide range of skills and aptitude. To achieve this The ISDC offers a number of career tracks.

Career development is a combination of training and experience.

Training

The first step in any ISDC career is completing a training course on a ship system, which awards a qualification known as a rating - so called because it means the successful trainee is now ‘rated’ to operate that system during missions.

Training will be an ongoing feature of an ISDC career, opening up the range of missions that can be joined and contributing to promotion.

Experience

Active duty on missions is logged as experience, which accumulates in blocks of hours known as experience units. This counts towards promotion.

Officers

Officers are the coordinators of the ISDC, ensuring the successful completion of missions and projects.

This career track is focused on developing a broad range of skills and experience as well as the leadership skills necessary to ensure effectiveness in dangerous and tactically complex environments.

Crew Specialists

Crew are the ISDC’s technical specialists, whose highly-focussed training and experience allows them to amass considerable expertise in their chosen field.  As crew careers progress, their training and skills become more targeted, allowing them to contribute to system improvement or even the development of new systems in their field.

The most critical operational positions aboard a vessel will be held by senior crew.

Warrant Officers

Warrant Officers join the ISDC from advanced careers in specialist technical or scientific fields. Unlike the military careers of their commissioned colleagues, warrant officers have undertaken exclusively civilian career development prior to their entry to the ISDC.

Warrant Officers are most commonly found in engineering, scientific or medical roles.

The Academy

The ISDC’s Fleet Training and Research Academy – known simply as the Academy – provides training and development opportunities for the crew.

The Academy delivers online training courses consisting of video seminars supported by reference materials for each vessel system. Courses typically include practical training evolutions for crew to apply their new skills supported by Academy instructors.

Once rated on a system, crew members have access to a sophisticated simulation facility allowing them to build practical experience across a wide range of mission scenarios.

Crew are encouraged to form crew teams with complementary ratings to make it easy to run a range of missions. As well as honing their skills, mission hours in the simulator are logged and contribute to a crew member's experience.