Spinnaker’s ‘Maritime HR Association’ collects not only salary and bonus data as part of its annual salary survey, but also that of nationality.

This nationality data is included in a specific report which looks at the split of nationality by job family and location.

When looking at a nationality split, we need to remember that we can’t expect the distribution of nationalities to be even in all job families due to many factors including:

• The historical consideration. In countries where the shipping industry has been long established, there are more high-quality maritime specialists due to the abundance of opportunities to study, gain experience and skills.
• Job location. Many shipping companies have different departments in different locations which can influence the nationality split of certain job families.

In 2022, just under a quarter of incumbents in the salary survey were working in India – it is therefore not surprising that 31% of them were Indian nationals.

Danish, Norwegian and British nationals are more likely to be found in executive leadership and more senior roles.

11% of all Technical & Marine and HSEQ roles are located in India, consequently, Indian nationals are filling more than a quarter of these roles. Indian, Greek, Norwegian and Danish nationals prefer technical specialisms over marine specialisms; British, Singaporean, American and Malaysian incumbents are, on the contrary, more commonly performing marine roles.

Singapore, USA, Denmark and the UK offer just over half of all chartering and freight trading jobs. The British prefer chartering to freight trading, while Danes have a slightly more noticeable presence in freight trading than in chartering. Both nationalities are more commonly found in senior positions.

As for the Commercial Operations and Crewing job families, we can hope for increasing numbers of Filipino nationals in more senior positions in the future – in 2022, the largest percentage of Filipinos was reported under ‘00’ (trainee) job code which offers the opportunity for promotion.

Crewing became the only reportable job family in 2022 where we could trace a noticeable Eastern European presence, mainly Polish and Ukrainian, who are more commonly found in Professional roles.

To find out more details about the nationality split in the maritime industry please contact our benchmarking team at [email protected].

Written by Daryna Rozum, Reward Consultant, Spinnaker