Standardization of Maritime Education and Training in Bangladesh to Face the Global Challenges in the Seafarer’s Job Market

Abstract

Bangladesh is lagging behind in the process of learning maritime education and training (MET) to create qualified seafarer for occupying global seafarer’s job market. Driven in particular, existing institutions of the country are unable to attract students to choose the sea job as career with high salary and opportunity to travel all over the world. Consequently, MET is facing various challenges including human and technological resources in teaching and training respectively to sit on the competency examination in developed maritime countries like UK, Singapore, etc. Moreover, teaching methods and practical training at sea are great barriers to produce global standard seafarers from Bangladesh. Remarkably, participation in the MET in Bangladesh is in infant stage and low profile, which does not indicate a good attitude towards this profession. In a sense, it may be occurring due to less friendly environment of the institution’s training place, ineffective teaching method or style of delivering lessens to students and non-availability of trainer of MET in Bangladesh. Standard MET from any country has always attracted the ship management companies or ship owners to recruit seafarers from that particular country. Bangladesh has geographical advantages in the Bay of Bengal and may take the opportunity of having world class MET to get a share of the global job market in this area. To follow the trends of globalization of maritime business, maritime community aimed to develop standardized curriculum for training where educational program vary from country to country even in different institutions of a single country. In this connection, it is necessary to develop standard curriculum by the government for training institution and advertise to the students, guardians and others by focusing on the job opportunity and training facilities for men. This paper aims to analyse how to meet the licensing and customer requirements of MET to get world standard license of seafarers and their demand by the ship owner or ship management company to cope with the basic requirements in the seafarers’ global job market.