Day 2 - Certification, Technology & the Energy Transition - SGT (Singapore Time, GMT+08:00)
The IMO HTW Sub-Committee Chair presents the Phase 2 priorities following HTW 12 — just weeks before CCG 2026. The STCW is shipping's professional qualification scaffold — and it is being redesigned while people are still standing on it. The Phase 1 review identified 22 gap areas including emerging technology, mental health and gender sensitisation. Each panellist must first argue the position they most disagree with before making their own case, forcing intellectual honesty about which gaps are genuinely being closed, and which are being quietly parked.
▸ FORMAT 2: The Steel Man Debate — argue the opposing view first
Each speaker must first argue the position they disagree with as convincingly as possible before making their own case. Forces intellectual honesty and produces more nuanced outcomes.
Ships are being assigned increasingly poorly trained crew; senior officers express growing concern about junior colleagues' basic navigation skills in the face of GNSS jamming, AIS spoofing and constantly multiplying digital systems. DNV has warned of a growing safety gap as new technologies outpace existing work practices. The MASS Code reaches a regulatory inflection point at IMO in May 2026. The room assumes it is 2032 and two things have gone badly wrong: technostress has caused a major navigational incident, and the MASS Code has hollowed out the officer pipeline. Working backwards, participants diagnose the warning signs and what could have been done. The second half brings the IMO and training sector in to respond.
▸ FORMAT 5: The Premortem — assume it is 2032 and it went wrong
Participants assume it is 2032 and something has gone badly wrong. Working backwards, the room diagnoses what went wrong and why. People are more honest about risks when failure is treated as a given.
The MSW mandate came into force January 2026. This session moves past regulatory announcement into operational reality: what operators are finding, where the capability gaps are, and how digital STCW verification (MSC.1/Circ.1665) is working in practice — including the fraud dimension. Port State Control officers now use QR codes and unique tracking numbers for instant verification. The session examines whether digitisation reduces fraud or merely shifts it.
▸ FORMAT 2: The Steel Man Debate
Each speaker must first argue the position they disagree with as convincingly as possible before making their own case. Forces intellectual honesty and produces more nuanced outcomes.
HTW 12 met in London in February 2026 and finalised two sets of draft interim training guidelines — one for seafarers on ships using methyl/ethyl alcohols as fuel and one for ammonia — which will be submitted to MSC 111 in May 2026 for approval. HTW 12 also agreed a work plan extending to 2029, recognising the close interdependence between training provisions and parallel technical safety developments underway across IMO. That’s a seven-year runway to mandatory standards, in an industry where methanol vessels are already operating and ammonia carriers are being ordered. Given this, we consider:
- Who certifies the Certifiers? For example, if an academy in Manila certifies a seafarer on ammonia handling, using instructors who have never been near an ammonia-fuelled vessel, using a simulator that approximates the conditions rather than replicates them — is that certificate worth the paper it’s printed on? And who is liable when it turns out it isn’t?
- Who pays? The base certification is a regulatory floor, and the real cost of competence sits with the shipowner. In practice, evidence from other upskilling cycles suggests a significant proportion of that cost migrates to the seafarer, through unpaid training time, self-funded courses, and reduced employability without new endorsements.
- Is consolidation possible — or are we building a certification tower of Babel? The ICS is advocating for one consolidated alternative fuel training programme combining LNG, methanol, ammonia and hydrogen to avoid multiple certifications and to facilitate seafarer mobility. This is the right aspiration. The risk is that commercial pressures produce the opposite: fuel-specific certificates from competing institutions, with no mutual recognition, creating a fragmented market that disadvantages smaller operators and seafarers from lower-income supply nations.
▸ FORMAT 4: Speed Consulting — expert rotation, table challenge cards
Tables of 6–8 delegates with a specific operational problem card. Expert speakers rotate every 12–15 minutes. Each table reports back one actionable insight. Concentrated, practical — no room for waffle.