Japan will help train maritime lecturers for Viet Nam under a recent agreement signed in Ha Noi between the Viet Nam Maritime Administration and the Seamen’s Employment Center of Japan (SECOJ).

The annual training course is dedicated to four Vietnamese lecturers aged 25 to 50, who work for maritime training schools with at least one year of experience.

The course will be taught in English by Japanese professors. This year, SECOJ trains four people instead of two, as in previous years.

Vietnamese are pictured working on board a steel-clad ship

Naoya Nakamura, who is in charge of the cooperation program, said that all Vietnamese lecturers have well met the requirements of the course, adding that there are only 2% of sailors working on Japanese ships are Japanese citizens.

Filipinos account for 75% of the sailors, followed by Indians with 7%, while Myanmarese and Chinese both make up 4%.

According to Nguyen Nhat, head of the Viet Nam Maritime Administration, there is a high demand for skilled maritime workers in the country now but local schools are still unable to satisfy it.

Statistics show that the number of Vietnamese seamen working on foreign ships at present is around 2,000.

This number was 6,000 several years ago while local ships are employing roughly 25,000 such sailors.