Bridging Education and Future Work: Reframing Education and Competence Model for Remote Maritime Operations (REFRAME)

The emergence of remotely controlled and autonomous vessels presents a paradigm shift in maritime operations, necessitating a re-evaluation of the human operator’s role and function within this new framework. The REFRAME project endeavors to explain the transformations in knowledge, skills and competencies, and to understand the impact of digitalization and remote maritime operations on students, educators and educational systems. It scrutinizes the emerging technical and non-technical skills essential for shipboard officers and remote operators to excel in the age of remote maritime operations. By drawing parallels from aviation and aquaculture industry, which have embraced remote operations, REFRAME gathers insights on human factors and technical expertise related to land control of autonomous systems. This initiative underscores the need to reframe the educational model and instructional strategies to align with evolving industrial demands and effectively prepare the workforce of the future.

Professional education is essential for effective youth transition into the labour market and it is a key to a sustainable and inclusive society. Professional education provides individuals with skills and competence for employment in specific occupations. Among numerous professional fields, the maritime domain is vital to society and the economy through transporting more than 80% of the world trade and supporting around 31 million jobs for the global society (OECD, 2016; UNCTAD, 2022). The maritime industry is currently undergoing profound changes with increased automation and digitalisation under the 4th industrial revolution (DNV, 2018; Schwab, 2016). Technological development in remotely enabled autonomous maritime operations has progressed rapidly worldwide, and has been transformed from a vision to reality. However, with the new technology comes the need for operators to be trained for its use. Having the operators placed remotely will reduce ship sense, pose new attentional and cognitive demands for seafarers (Lützhöft & Dekker, 2002) and cause the current seamanship requirement, education and competence framework to no longer be fully applicable. The current international conventions and training requirements do not yet account for the needs of future ship operators involved in remote-control operations. Limited research to date has been undertaken on the skill shifts and reflect on how to effectively prepare the maritime workforce of the future. This research project aims to take a cross industrial sector and interdisciplinary approach to contribute to the education transition towards the remotely-controlled maritime future and produce research-based knowledge and policy recommendation that can contribute to societal resilience of educational challenges introduced by fast-paced digital transformation.