Customer Service Assistant Northlink Ferrie

A customer service assistant on a ferry operator's routes (NorthLink runs services between the Scottish mainland and Orkney and Shetland) is a front-line hospitality and passenger-services job. You sell and check tickets, help passengers board with luggage, vehicles and pets, work in the onboard shop, bar, café or cabins, and answer questions from travellers, freight customers and islanders. The work happens either in a port terminal office or on board the vessel itself, on shift patterns that cover overnight sailings.

Approximate graduate salary

Front-line customer service and hospitality roles in the UK ferry sector typically start somewhere around GBP 22,000-27,000 a year for full-time work, or an hourly rate at or a little above the National Living Wage, though this varies widely by employer, contract type and role. Onboard roles on overnight routes often pay more than shore-based terminal roles once shift, night and weekend allowances are added, and accommodation and meals may be provided while you are on board. Seasonal contracts are usually paid hourly. Treat any figure as approximate and check the specific advert.

What you'd actually do

Checking in passengers and vehicles at a port terminal - taking bookings, issuing boarding cards, checking documents and directing cars, campervans and freight into the correct marshalling lanes
Working an onboard service point: cabin allocation and keys, reclining-seat and pod bookings, lost property, and dealing with passengers who have booked the wrong sailing or missed one
Serving in the ship's café, bar, shop or restaurant - taking food orders, operating tills, restocking, and complying with food hygiene and licensing rules
Cleaning and turning around cabins and public areas between sailings, which on overnight routes is a genuine and physical part of the job rather than an afterthought
Handling disruption: explaining cancellations or delays caused by weather, rebooking passengers, arranging accommodation or onward travel and absorbing a lot of frustration from people who need to get home
Safety duties - most seagoing crew, whatever their day job, hold a role in the ship's muster and emergency plan and take part in drills, so you might be a shop assistant on Tuesday and a member of a lifeboat or fire party in a drill on Wednesday
Answering phone and email enquiries about timetables, fares, accessibility, pet travel and freight, and taking payments

How graduates get in

Direct application to advertised vacancies is by far the most common route. Ferry operators recruit customer service and hospitality staff continuously rather than through a graduate scheme, and posts are usually advertised individually as they arise.
Seasonal and summer recruitment is a standard way in. Passenger volumes on Scottish island routes peak in summer, so temporary contracts are common and often lead to permanent or fixed-term work if you perform well.
Coming from another hospitality or retail job - bar, hotel, café, supermarket, visitor attraction - is the most typical background. This is a hospitality job that happens to be at sea.
Local recruitment matters a lot on these routes. Living in, or being genuinely willing to relocate to, Aberdeen, Scrabster, Stromness, Kirkwall, Lerwick or the surrounding areas is often effectively a requirement for shore-based roles, because shift patterns make long commutes impractical.
For graduates specifically, this is not usually a structured graduate scheme. If you want a management-track entry into ferry or wider transport operations, look instead at graduate schemes run by larger transport groups, or at maritime operations and port management roles, and treat front-line customer service as a way to build sector experience rather than as the scheme itself.
An unusual but real route: maritime studies, nautical science or hospitality management courses at Scottish colleges and universities sometimes lead into shore-side or onboard roles through placements and local contacts.

What employers ask for

No degree is required and the subject is irrelevant. Employers ask for basic literacy and numeracy - often expressed as standard grades or GCSE/National 5 equivalents in English and maths - rather than a degree classification.
Customer-facing experience is what actually gets read on the application: retail, hospitality, bar work, call centres, tourism. Cash handling and till experience is a plus.
Willingness to work shifts, including nights, weekends, public holidays and overnight sailings. This is non-negotiable and is the single biggest reason people leave the job.
For seagoing roles you will normally need a seafarer medical certificate (an ENG1 or equivalent) and basic safety training to STCW standard - personal survival techniques, fire prevention and fire fighting, elementary first aid and personal safety and social responsibilities. Employers vary on whether they fund and arrange this for you or expect you to hold it already; ask before you apply.
A basic disclosure or criminal record check is common for roles with access to secure port areas, and port security clearance may be required.
Food hygiene certification is usually needed for catering duties, but is normally provided as part of induction rather than expected up front.

Skills that matter

Staying calm with angry, tired or anxious passengers

Weather cancellations on northern routes are frequent and you are the visible person explaining why someone is stranded overnight, when the decision was made by a captain you have never met.

Working comfortably at sea

The Pentland Firth and the Aberdeen-Lerwick crossing can be genuinely rough, and you still need to serve food, clean cabins and reassure passengers while the ship is moving.

Accuracy under time pressure

Check-in has a hard cut-off before sailing, and a mis-scanned vehicle booking or wrong cabin allocation causes a knock-on problem that cannot be fixed once the ship has left.

Safety awareness and following procedure exactly

Maritime safety rules are legally enforced, drills are audited, and you are expected to know your muster station duties as reliably as your till procedure.

Local and route knowledge

Islanders travel these routes constantly for hospital appointments, funerals, school and work, so knowing connecting buses, freight cut-offs and the rhythm of the timetable makes you far more useful than someone reading off a screen.

Teamwork in a small, confined crew

On overnight sailings you live and work with the same handful of colleagues for the length of your rotation, so getting on with people and pulling your weight matters more than in a typical shop job.

Where it leads

Seasonal or casual contract to a permanent or fixed-term customer service assistant post - this often depends simply on vacancies coming up, so timelines vary a lot.
Senior or supervisory front-line roles: senior customer service assistant, purser's assistant, bar or catering supervisor, or terminal supervisor overseeing a check-in shift.
Purser or chief steward-type roles on board, with responsibility for passenger services, cash handling, manifests and the hotel side of the vessel. This normally takes several years of onboard experience and usually additional certification.
Shore-side operational or commercial roles: port operations, freight and logistics coordination, reservations and revenue, or terminal management. Graduates sometimes move sideways into these faster than colleagues without degrees, because the roles involve reporting, systems and analysis.
Wider transport and tourism careers: cruise lines, other UK ferry operators, airport ground and passenger services, or tourism development bodies. Ferry customer service experience transfers well across all of these.

What people get wrong

“It is mainly a desk job selling tickets.”

A large share of the work is physical hospitality - cleaning cabins, restocking, carrying stores, standing for a whole shift, working in a moving vessel. Many people are surprised how much of the role is closer to hotel housekeeping and bar work than to office-based customer service.

“Customer service staff have nothing to do with ship safety.”

Seagoing crew almost always hold designated emergency duties and must complete mandatory safety training and regular drills. Your official job title says 'customer service', but you are legally a seafarer with responsibilities in a fire or evacuation.

“It is a graduate scheme with a structured training programme.”

Ferry operators generally recruit these posts as individual operational vacancies, often seasonally, with on-the-job training rather than a cohort-based graduate programme. Graduates apply on the same footing as everyone else, and a degree gives little advantage at entry - it matters more later, if you move towards commercial or management roles.

“The customers are mostly tourists on holiday.”

On lifeline routes serving Orkney and Shetland, much of the traffic is residents, key workers, hospital patients, students and freight. Cancellations are not an inconvenience to a holiday - they can mean a missed operation or a missed funeral, which changes the tone of the conversations you have.

Where this varies

Practice differs a lot depending on where you sit. Shore-based terminal roles are regular-ish shift work near your home port with no seafarer certification needed; onboard roles on overnight sailings involve rotations where you live on the vessel, need a seafarer medical and STCW safety training, and are paid and rostered differently. Contract types also vary widely - permanent, fixed-term, seasonal and casual all exist side by side, and the balance shifts with the summer tourist season. Operators differ on whether they fund your safety training and medical or expect you to arrange it, and on how much of the catering and cleaning work sits in the customer service job description versus a separate catering department. Finally, ferry operations in Scotland run on public service contracts that are periodically retendered, which means the operating company on a given route can change; terms and conditions usually transfer with staff, but it is worth understanding before you commit to relocating.

General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.