The IBTC International Boatbuilding Training College Lowestoft is proud to offer a wide range of traditional boatbuilding and joinery courses together with shorter courses exploring additional woodworking skills and maritime crafts.
Considering enrolling on a course? Want to see if IBTC is the place for you?
Sign up for one of our 2024 Open Days, tour the Boatbuilding college, and meet the students and tutors.
Dates for 2024:
30 November
Dates for 2025:
25 January
29 March
31 May
9 August
4 October
29 November
Being able to build a boat beautifully is not enough. It may give tremendous self-satisfaction, however, at the end of the day, it must also lead to being able to provide reasonably comfortably for yourself and your family. It is for this reason that the IBTC, uniquely, ensures that its instructors are not only expert in their professions but also have real world proven, successful, experience in the boatbuilding business.
The IBTC Concept of Training Experience has shown that training opportunities limited to just two or three boats is totally insufficient – which is why the IBTC always has a wide variety of boats, both large and small, at different stages of construction at any one time. This ensures that there is always a boat available and at a stage which will enable trainees to build skills in a truly systematic and properly structured way. You do not have to wait for a boat to reach a certain stage of construction before you are able to move on, and you are always able to continue to the next stage of learning once you have satisfactorily completed each exercise. It is a very important concept of IBTC training that the boats built, repaired or restored as training exercises are only worked on whenever they present the opportunity for appropriately timed exercises for students. High standards of accuracy and finish are set from the start of each course.
Our concept of training enables our students to cover and learn the wide range of skills in our training programme in the shortest time possible. It ensures, too, that by the end of their course, you will have the ability and confidence to build, repair or restore a boat. Almost all learning is through practical exercises, (learning by doing), with the essential knowledge element fed in by instructors at the relevant moment. This huge amount of practical experience is one of the many reasons why IBTC students remain head and shoulders above others.
Read more about IBTC Lowestoft, one of our two Shipshape Network East Hubs.