AEC 1 — worth doing as a deckhand, or wait?

Thinking about doing AEC 1 this winter. I'm a deckhand with one season in and I keep being told it's the thing that separates you from the other forty CVs. But it's not cheap and I'd be paying for it myself. Does it genuinely get you hired, or is it one of those tickets everyone collects and nobody asks about?

It got me hired. Not because of the certificate itself, but because on a 35m boat the captain wants someone who can help in the engine room, and AEC is the shorthand for "this person won't be useless down there". If you want to work on smaller boats, it's one of the best things you can spend money on. If you're aiming for 70m+ where there are three engineers, less so.

Same experience. Did AEC 1 and 2 and it turned me from a deckhand into a deck/engineer, which is a different salary band entirely. The other thing nobody mentions — it makes you much better at describing a fault to an engineer over the phone. That alone has been worth it.

From the engine room side: yes, do it. Half the deckhands I've worked with couldn't tell me which pump was running. The one who could ended up as my deck/engineer.