Flexible Learning Path outroll

Introduction
All industries are challenged today in relation to filling vacant positions and recruiting competent employees. The maritime industry is no exception.

It is therefore important to attract employees to the maritime sector, by giving them a long-term career perspective where they can see a range of different career opportunities available that can allow them to develop their skills and stay in the sector for many years. It is also important to retain employees who already are in the industry, to afford them opportunities to stay in the industry and develop their skills and use them in new career opportunities. It is also more common today that professionals have a Master’s degree or contemplate how to acquire this.

One way of ensuring both attraction and retainment of the workforce is by ensuring that there are flexible educational opportunities in the maritime sector.

In prolongation of the signed MoU between Fredericia College of Marine and Technical Engineer-ing (FMS) and University of Southern Denmark (SDU), this document will lay out the activities for the outroll of Flexible Learning Path (FLP) activities.

This document may be used to explain FLP and used in promotion activities.

Flexible Learning Paths
It is not always clear for students how they may create a maritime educational learning path in Denmark, with the current educational structure for Maritime Education and Training (MET). This creates an inequality for Danish students’ educational opportunities in relation to other comparable seafaring nations. This makes it therefore necessary to assist students with information on and about educational collaborations.

FMS and SDU have thus joined forces in the aim to promote maritime education in Denmark and assist maritime students with information on how they may take an educational path that begins at FMS with a bachelor’s degree and ends at SDU with a PhD degree.

Special consideration is therefore made to enable capacity building in relation to The United Na-tions Education 2030 Agenda that encourages all countries to develop education systems that offer FLP for their students. The FLP may offer maritime students an excellent opportunity for diverse employment opportunities upon industry entry and enabling the learning pathway of graduate, postgraduate and Ph.D. educations for maritime students, maritime lecturers, and maritime professionals in general.

Learning pathways – FMS and SDU educations in joint collaboration
FMS offers or takes part in:
• Professional Bachelor's Programme entitled Bachelor of Technology Management and Marine Engineering
• Post-graduate programme entitled Diploma of Technology in Maintenance
• Post-graduate programme entitled Diploma in Maritime Leadership (Blue diploma)

SDU offers or takes part in:
• Master programme entitled Master of Science in Technology in Risk and Safety Management
• Master programme entitled Master of Public Health
• PhD programme

A concrete plan of the FLP outroll is agreed upon by the institutions.