THE HEART/NSTA Trust says, up to Thursday, it had checked more than 6,000 applications from the large crowd of Jamaicans who responded to its cruise ship job fair last week.

According to the agency’s Marketing and Communications Manager Julian Patrick, the majority of the applications are for positions in the areas of housekeeping, human resources, guest operations, food and beverage, and culinary arts.

The applications, he said, were received on forms provided by the agency or via e-mail as was directed to the hundreds of job seekers last week.

“What it has showed us is that the cruise shipping perspective is very much in demand — more in demand than many other programmes,” Patrick told the Jamaica Observer.

“It has certainly been an outstanding example of gauging other programmes against it, because when you put out recruitment for construction or other jobs we have never got this sort of feedback. So it is, of course, a lesson, an indicator to us that clearly there is something in the cruise ship sector that has particular appeal to Jamaicans,” he added.

According to Patrick, there are recruitments for other programmes including photography, plumbing, coding, and drywall making.

Last Thursday, hundreds of Jamaicans turned up at HEART College of Beauty Services Campus at Hope Road, St Andrew, applying for jobs in the cruise industry.

Overwhelmed by the large number of job seekers, the agency stopped handing out application forms and, instead, directed them to send résumés to an e-mail address.

In the meantime, Patrick said that a Train the Trainer programme for electric vehicle services was launched on Monday.

He said the aim is to train about 400 Jamaicans by summer.

“What we have done is that we partnered with the Jamaica Public Service Company Limited and the International Development Bank. Electric vehicles, as you can imagine, are not the same. We have brought down the persons who will now train people across the island who are capable of working on electric vehicles,” he said, noting that training will be done at the Jamaican-German Automotive School.