The current seafarer market is abundant in sailors, but still lacks high-quality human resources.
About half a year ago, finding crew members has no longer been a struggle for Mr. Nguyen Dai Hai, Deputy Director of Tan Cang Shipping Joint Stock Company and his colleagues.
During the Covid-19 epidemic, every time it was time to change crew members, it made him and the board of directors worried. Lacking human resources, businesses have to swap people with other companies or accept low-quality crew members to have enough staff to operate the ship. But now, companies are selected more carefully to recruit the desired human resources.
“Now selection can be based on background, with priority given to hard-working, healthy people, or based on seniority, experience working on ships, and good qualifications,” Mr. Hai shared.
According to experts, during the Covid-19 epidemic, many countries with strong seafarer forces such as Myanmar, Philippines, China… tightened regulations on epidemic prevention, so the market was scarce of seafarers. In that context, the Vietnamese seafarers market is “attention”.
Foreign ship owners have paid very high salaries to attract Vietnamese seafarers without requiring much in terms of quality and professional qualifications.
Currently, the situation has changed because seafarers from other countries have returned to the market. Excess human resources and ship owners’ stricter requirements for quality when recruiting make many low-quality Vietnamese seafarers easily lose their jobs.
Mr. Pham Tuan Dung, Deputy Director of SCC Seafarer Supply Company Limited (SCCM), said that in the past, Chinese ship owners did not require high foreign language skills.
Now, these ship owners will personally interview to select people, so crew members must be able to hear and speak English.
At the same time, ship owners also set criteria for experience working on large ships, while Vietnamese seafarers mainly travel on small ships.
Japanese ship owners are even more demanding, requiring crew members to have a TOEIC foreign language proficiency of 300 points.
“The English proficiency of Vietnamese seafarers is lower than that of the crew from the Philippines, Myanmar, and India, so it is more difficult to be recruited,” Mr. Dung said.
Source: bao Giaothong.vn