The Ship’s Electro-Technical Officer: Essential at Sea, Optional on Paper

Over the past decade, merchant ships have been fitted with new layers of electrical and electronic equipment. Scrubbers, ballast water treatment plants, shore-power interfaces, dual-fuel engines with electronic fuel-injection control, cyber-hardened bridge systems: each additional layer means more programmable controllers, more sensors, more high-voltage components. Yet the position responsible for keeping all those electronic systems alive at sea is still not required by the International Maritime Organization to be on board. On most vessel classes, the Electro-Technical Officer does not appear on the Minimum Safe Manning Document.

A documented regulatory gap

Across most flag administrations, ETO carriage on merchant vessels is treated as optional — it depends on agreement between owner and flag administration and is reflected on the vessel's Safe Manning Document. In Canada, the contrast is sharper still. Transport Canada endorses foreign tanker proficiency certificates on the basis of reciprocal arrangements, but does not endorse the Electro-Technical Officer Certificate of Competency itself, and no domestic Canadian training pathway to the ETO credential exists.

The result is a professional class that international regulation recognises but minimum manning rules do not. STCW Regulation III/6 requires every ETO serving on a vessel with propulsion above 750 kW to hold the certificate. The regulator that sets the minimum crew list does not count the role as essential crew. The credential is required to hold the job; the job itself is not required to exist.

Ten years, six vessel types, one certificate

Ukrainian ETO Vadym Dudych received his first ETO Certificate of Competency in 2016, after cadet service on his first ship and final examinations at maritime college. At the time, Ukraine issued the credential in three domestic classes — a national grading system that has since been revised. His CoC was replaced under the current rules in 2024, alongside the routine five-year renewal of his flag endorsement, which has always been issued without class restrictions. His ten-year career spans container vessels, a bulk carrier, oil-chemical tankers, a ro-ro passenger vessel (Qajaq W), and a short assignment on a DP2 ROV survey and cable repair vessel (IT Integrity).

Under the Canadian flag, Norbulk operates two tankers of this class. The full ETO establishment across both vessels is four people — one on board and one on rotation for each ship. As Dudych describes the rotation, someone always replaces him when he goes on leave — one officer steps off as the other steps on, and the model works only as long as the pool of available ETOs is deep enough to sustain it.

The supply-side numbers

The 2026 Seafarer Workforce Report from BIMCO and the International Chamber of Shipping estimates a shortage of 39,100 STCW-certified officers this year, projects a need for an additional 113,735 officers by 2030, and puts the current global fleet at 85,148 merchant ships crewed by roughly 2.57 million seafarers. The 2021 edition of the same report had already flagged a shortage of officers with technical experience at management level — the broad category to which Electro-Technical Officers belong.

Why the pipeline is thin

The path from zero to Unlimited ETO takes about four years of formal maritime education, followed by cadet and assistant service on board — the length and structure of which depend on the employer. Ukraine has established training institutions for this — the Kherson State Maritime Academy and the Maritime College of Technical Fleet among them. In Canada, there is no equivalent pathway; a hiring manager searching for an ETO in North America is searching internationally by default.

Retention has its own obstacles. Ships operate around the clock, without weekends, with sea conditions that expose motion sensitivity, on contracts that pull officers away from family for weeks at a time. The vessel is a workplace and a residence at once — what Dudych describes as a second existence away from shore routine. Younger candidates weigh that trade-off differently from the generation currently at management level.

Mentorship inside the profession happens on an ad hoc basis. During a contract on MOL Growth as Junior ETO, Dudych spent six months alongside an assistant electrician from Georgia, passing on hands-on practice with the ship's electrical systems. Structured programmes to grow the next cohort of ETOs are rare — the industry mostly relies on individual senior officers taking that role informally.

A profession redefined by its equipment

The technical case for the position has never been stronger. Dudych estimates that the volume of electronics on the ships he has served on has grown roughly tenfold over the past decade. Component-level repair has become harder. New engines run on electronic fuel-injection control, and analogue systems are steadily disappearing from the fleet. Replacement of modules has largely displaced repair of components as the practical response to a fault at sea.

Modernising the fleet without modernising the manning rules that govern it produces a growing mismatch between what modern vessels require and what regulation prescribes. Vessels grow more electronic; the position responsible for the electronics remains, in most flag registries, optional. When a ship at sea loses steering control because of a switchboard fault, the response depends on whether a qualified electrical officer is on board.

The revision of IMO Resolution A.1047(27) on Principles of Minimum Safe Manning is the mechanism through which this gap will close, or fail to close. Individual flag administrations can move ahead of that timetable. The commercial case for treating the Electro-Technical Officer as core crew already sits in every cargo control room and every switchboard flat afloat.