Traditional seafarer training has always focused on the acquisition and use of practical skills. The prevailing view is that, while this approach addresses a degree of cognitive skills, it focuses on and gives much more emphasis to the acquisition of hands-on practical skills for the performance of specific tasks. On the other hand, academic education has been seen to be much more focused on the development of in-depth analytical and critical thinking skills; cognitive skills that are less reliant on hands-on task-oriented training, but stress critical reading and discussion. The global trend in maritime education and training is increasingly to link an essentially vocational education that provides specific and restricted competence outcomes with more general or deeper academic components leading to an academic qualification. This trend has led to some dilemmas for curriculum development, for training legislation in a global industry, and for achieving desired learning outcomes in a professional setting (in the shipping industry). This paper discusses some of the challenges arising from this trend and the opportunities the trend offers. In almost all countries and cultures of the world, operational education and training for transportation on water has origins in an on-the-job training paradigm. The first attempts at codifying international training of seafarers were undertaken under the auspices of the WMU J Marit Affairs (2017) Despite being such a seminal convention, its limitations were many, not least the bias towards a cognitive education paradigm whose outcomes were vague and not optimally addressing the on-the-job competence requirements of industry. This, together with other factors, led to calls for a revision, which resulted in substantial amendments to the regulatory annex to the convention in 1995. Among other things, the perceived deficiency of skill-based competence requirements was rectified. With the addition of many specific competence standards in a new Seafarers Training, Certification and Watchkeeping (STCW) Code-standards which were to be evaluated by observable competence criteria-the focus on task-based competence was brought back. This was an important development and created a framework for increased focus on competence as the bedrock of work at sea. The 2010 Manila Amendments to the Code in the main retains this paradigm, a vocational educational approach whose task-structured nature relies very much on criterion-referenced and outcomes-based assessments that are mainly in the skills domain. The Convention (in its accompanying Code) explicitly indicates expected standards of competence, the associated knowledge, understanding, and proficiency required, and importantly the methods for demonstrating competence and criteria for evaluating such demonstration of competence. This is definitive of the STCW Convention-a paradigm heavily influenced by competence-based training and requiring specific practical and performance-based outcomes. However, the STCW Convention has been devel...

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World trade is dependent on shipping. The ships which facilitate this trade are crewed by thousands of men and women from many different nations. In light of recent incidents/accidents which have drawn adverse media attention to the industry, there has been increased focus on international shipping via various legislative and administrative measures. One consequence of the adverse attention seems to be the way that individuals who crew the ships are being treated in various jurisdictions. This paper discusses some potential sociological impacts of what is often perceived to be the unfair treatment of seafarers and how such sociological impacts may have more technical consequences (impacts) related to risk. It generates some hypothetical positions for the purposes of discussion and is not based on empirical findings.

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