‘Smart’ ships are now coming into service, creating demand for a new generation of competent, highly skilled maritime professionals.
Following the rapid technology emerge, maritime education and training must seek effective training methods to meet the needs of the shipping industry. Training courses should be accessible from anywhere and at any time.
At the same time, future skills and competence need to originate from the four key trends that are shaping the future:
- sustainable development
- collaboration of clusters
- digitalization
- education
In line with these trends, one of the rational solutions for improving current maritime professional education and training is simulation-based learning, with lifelong learning attribution. Three areas could be addressed:
- Developing maritime professionals’ competence and skillsets in response to the rapid development of onboard technologies such as ICT and sustainable technologies.
- Improve seafarers’ soft skills in leadership and management with new training programs aimed at both furthering their onboard career and supporting the transition to an onshore career.
- Establishing bridging programs that complement the IMO certificate-based education towards occupational profiles with a wider reach in the areas of digital, sustainable, transversal and leadership skills. The aim is to help bridging the distances between shore-based and seagoing profiles.
‘Speaking of better training, simulators will help seafarers not only to learn the highly contextualized knowledge of work settings but will also provide them with the ability to work together in teams to demonstrate qualities such as critical thinking and leadership’…a report from the EU project SKILLSEA notes.
According to the report, foreseeing future skills is not the same as manpower planning. It would not make for a good prediction of how many seafarers, or even maritime professionals, will be needed in the future. However, foreseeing the future requires examination of the ways in which labor markets are developing and consequently, how jobs, skills and learning are changing.
As shipping needs a flexible, scalable training system, is important that maritime training institutions encourage the following:
- Integrating sustainable skills and digital skills in maritime training to enhance the competence and skills of maritime professionals.
- Integrating maritime law, business finance, remote operation and other new technology-based skills in maritime training to expand STCW training.
- Uplifting instructors’ knowledge of the future to be able to update training programs.
- Creating strong interdisciplinary environments to link researchers and maritime professionals to shape the technology-driven maritime world towards innovation.
- Maximize maritime professionals’ experience and competence for developing a sustainable technology innovation system.
- Establishing effective transfer schemes between academies and companies to address mobility and culture issues.
Concluding, in order to support new programs in seafarers’ training, the collaboration between the business community and research-based universities should explore new methods and new technology. Most skills required in the future are beyond the scope of current training courses and cover areas such as: advanced data analysis, operational economics, future onboard power and energy production, developing and using statistics and risk analysis. This demands educators to establish suitable lifelong learning programs that enable seafarers to work across industries and services in the maritime shipping sector.
Dear Sirs,
Many thanks for the insight that you provide in brief in this article,
We work hard at the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam to update the curriculum and add these skills & competences. The vision of our faculty of technology is based on the cooperation of education, research & industry, By doing so we create an education in which (1) obtaining knowledge and (2) applying that knowledge in real life situations is accomplished. The application of knowledge requires the usage of soft skills, working in a team with students of different background together with maritime organisations and companies and it is about a real case.
In my humble opinion the maritime education of the future is more than STCW; the competences mentioned in the appendix of this convention are relevant even today however they are the bare minimum for a professional on board. The challenges for the maritime industry require the skills and competences as you addressed so correctly in the article