The motivations and added values of embarking on postgraduate professional education: Evidences from the maritime industry

There has been recent growth of professional education where academic institutions increasingly offer postgraduate programmes on subjects traditionally emphasizing on apprentice-style/practical learning approach. The motivations behind such growth and the added values of these programmes to students, however, have remained under-researched. Hence, by investigating the maritime industry, this paper attempts to address such deficiency. Through a Likert-style questionnaire survey, it is found that the changing requirements within the maritime industry serve as the core factor in aspiring practitioners to pursue postgraduate maritime degrees, while such programmes are pivotal in human capital management through preparing and re-training maritime professionals to ensure ongoing excellence and provisions of effective services within the ever-changing maritime industry.