The high quality of maritime shipping services offered from Germany remains a decisive competitive advantage and is key to the future viability and competitiveness of the German maritime industry. Companies, social partners, educational institutions and policymakers must work together to ensure that Germany remains competitive as a shipping nation in future.
It takes excellently trained, highly qualified and motivated employees to operate a modern ship economically and in an environment-friendly manner. Work on board has become much more complex and the demands have increased. Anyone who has ever worked in a position of responsibility on a merchant ship is also ideally suited for higher management tasks on land. It has been shown that promoting the qualification of sea personnel can also create high-quality land-based jobs and keep them in the country in the long term. Those who train and develop maritime personnel are therefore serving the entire maritime cluster. This applies in particular to the qualification of employees at sea and on land for the upcoming major challenges of decarbonisation and progressing digitalisation.
To ensure that this continues to be the case in the longer term, the partners in the so-called “Maritime Alliance” have agreed – with broad political support, including from the German Bundestag – to promote training and employment in a sustainable manner. Shipowners’ substantial financial contributions to training, qualification and employment in maritime shipping highlight just how seriously they are taking this alliance: in recent years, they have invested 20 to 30 million euros annually, in particular in the foundation “Stiftung Schifffahrtsstandort”, but also in the form of significantly increased flag-out fees.
The success of the various government measures and the Foundation’s activities is reflected in the stabilising, and in some cases even slightly rising numbers of trainees and employees subject to social insurance contributions in the maritime professions despite the longstanding crisis and the fact that the number of ships in German registers has fallen significantly since 2021. The proportion of tonnage in the German merchant fleet operating under the German flag has also stabilised since the optimised support measures came into force, and has recently seen a slight upswing. In this way, German shipowners are helping ensure continued nautical and technical training and qualification of future crew members on board ships in German shipping registers – regardless of whether these vessels fly the German flag, another EU flag, or a flag from the European Economic Area (EEA). The system works.
