“THERE IS A RISING GLOBAL DEMAND FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE SERVED AT SEA AND ARE ABLE TO OFFER AN EMPLOYER THEIR TECHNICAL SKILLS IN AN OFFICE BASED POSITION”.
Since our last technical shipping market report (April 2010), we have seen a continual rise in confidence amongst both candidates and employers. Broadly speaking there is a rising global demand for people who have served at sea and are able to offer an employer their technical skills in an office based position.
Whether as surveyors or fleet managers, vetting or technical superintendents, candidates with previous shore based experience who are able to take on responsibility with a minimal amount of retraining are finding that their services are very much in demand. The tanker sector continues to be an active hirer of technical staff, accounting for a third of all our placements.
There are more jobs out there and there are good candidates too. We are not however seeing the speculative hires of the boom years, when companies were snapping up experienced technical staff and then worrying about finding them something to do. Today the challenge for employers seeking to bring in new blood or expand their operations is persuading candidates to move job and possibly relocate.
At the best of times it can be a difficult task to ask a good candidate in employment to take the leap and join your company, but against a backdrop of a difficult housing market, pessimism and uncertainty surrounding the general economy and a general sense of caution, employers searching for experienced and polished technical shipping people need to communicate the strength of their companies
and be prepared to be flexible.
This report is based on actual placements made by Faststream staff at our offices in the
UK, USA and Singapore between May 2010
and March 2011.
Mark Charman,
CEO Faststream
Globally speaking the average age of a technical shipping candidate placed by Faststream over this period was 42 and the average salary of £55K (USD $89K / SGD $111K). On average we were able to find and place a candidate within nine weeks. However, there were regional differences.
Whilst the future short and medium term outlook for the shipping industry remains unclear, the industry has a greater number of ships to be surveyed, managed and maintained than ever before by a workforce made up of a large proportion of people approaching retirement age. Whether the shipping industry will see earnings return to 2008 or 2002 levels remains to be seen, but companies do need to take a long term approach to recruitment and to plan well in advance.