Cross-Continental Careers: Inside the Work of a Subsea Cable Officer

Most frontline jobs in telecom aren’t the traditional nine-to-five — from replacing an antenna 300 feet in the snowy air to splicing fiber in the middle of the night. But some jobs in the sector are even more singular.  

Erin Greig lives on a ship for six weeks at a time, in 12‑hour rotations, helping steer 3,000 km of cable across the seafloor. As a third mate and navigational officer, her job is to hold a 100‑plus‑meter ship precisely on course while the internet is literally unspooled behind it. 

“Sometimes it's a bit glamorized, but you know, I like to tell people, I'm basically doing a big computer game for 12 hours a day,” she told Broadband Nation.  

Nearly a million miles of fiber-optic cables run along the bottom of the oceans — the core of global internet connectivity — and billions of dollars are being poured into laying more to feed the infrastructural appetites of AI. But even as the demand for these cables increases, the number of cable laying ships hasn’t kept pace. Only around 60 ships exists worldwide.  

Greig works on one of those ships. She’s one of the few people who sees the system from the bridge, not the browser. “I really thrive by being thrown into new environments,” she said. "Telecom is incredibly fascinating, especially with the growth that we're about to see with it.” 

Having been in the industry for nearly two years (and at sea for over a decade), she’s experienced a steep but rewarding learning curve to the work. She believes it best suits people with an interest in the unknown.  

“There's always going to be intimidation with things you don't know, and if you have the interest to uncover that, then I think you would excel at anything, including this industry,” said Greig. “We're all just a bunch of regular Joes out there doing all this work.” 

Baptism by fire  

While the job is a unique one within the world of broadband, Greig shared a common thread with many frontline technicians: she’d never worked in fiber.  

While the learning curve was “very steep” — full of new jargon, machinery and intense stakes — training was always a safe and supervised environment, she reflected. When first starting out, trainees are often paired with the most experienced bridge officer. 

Following a six-week apprenticeship, Greig’s company put her through an induction course on dynamic positioning — the computer system that controls a ship’s thrusters to hold course and position — along with a simulator exam to test handling systems in realistic scenarios. While employer-funded education is key to understanding the tools and systems, she stressed that — whether you’re a navigational officer like her or a splicer on board — the critical learning really comes from experience at sea.  

“It's just hands on,” she explained. “With any career, it's hard to put words that you're reading in a manual into real practical life without being involved in it.” It’s a kind of “baptism by fire.”  

While the technology training may feel like the most intimidating piece of the profession, the schedule is one that Greig noted as a big challenge: six weeks on, six weeks off.  

"You can’t switch off for six weeks,” she said. Luckily, Greig gets along with her coworkers, but client reps are often on board as well, so there is an element of social energy output to the job that isn’t for everyone.  

“We're representatives of the company at the end of the day, there are client reps on board… and you know, you've got to have company face on,” she added. 

Alongside being a company representative for over a month at a time, she also has to navigate often being the only woman on board.  

“But the guys are great,” she recognized, “and just my presence does change behavior... I hope that me being public will inspire other people to say, 'this could be an industry that's no longer just the boys club.'” Beck sees how subsea work is largely invisible to the people who may thrive in it — just as it was to her until she stumbled into it.

As a young girl growing up in Bermuda — where tourism and reinsurance were really the only career paths sold to the residents — Beck remembered always seeing a big white ship in the island dockyard. Years later she would learn that it was the Sir Eric Sharp, a cable ship owned by Cable & Wireless. That same vessel was eventually bought by a Canadian firm and renamed the IT Intrepid — the ship she currently works on today.  

“I just wish that, as a small kid, someone had told me this is a fiber optic cable… maybe I could have gotten in earlier,” she reflected — especially given Bermuda’s unique positioning within the world of subsea cabling. “But I hope that this information can get out to younger people, particularly Bermudians, who are going to have such a huge advantage at their front door very soon.”