Future Skills Mapping for Maritime Graduates in the Digital Transformation Era: A Mixed-Methods Expert Validation Study

Abstract

Digital transformation is restructuring the competency landscape across all three maritime professional streams — port and shipping management, deck navigation, and marine engineering — in ways that existing maritime vocational curricula have not yet mapped against industry-demanded future skills. This study develops a maritime-specific future skills taxonomy and empirically maps the gap between industry-demanded digital skills and current STIP Jakarta curriculum coverage through a mixed-methods design, combining expert-rated importance scoring with qualitative FGD validation across 30 experts representing all three STIP Jakarta programs. Results reveal a three-cluster skills gap structure: Technical-Digital Skills (major-specific digital competencies with expert importance M = 4.66/5 and curriculum adequacy M = 2.14/5), Cross-Disciplinary Digital Skills (platform and data competencies with importance M = 4.41/5 and curriculum adequacy M = 2.76/5), and Future-Oriented Professional Skills (adaptive and collaborative competencies with importance M = 4.18/5 and curriculum adequacy M = 3.24/5). The aggregate Skills Gap Index (SGI) across all three clusters and programs is 1.92 points on a 5-point scale, indicating a large, system-wide curriculum-industry misalignment. Program-specific SGI analysis reveals ENG cadets face the largest Technical-Digital skills gap (SGI = 3.11), primarily concentrated in IoT monitoring and predictive maintenance analytics, while PSM cadets face the largest Cross-Disciplinary skills gap (SGI = 2.74) centered on logistics data analytics. The study contributes the first empirically grounded, maritime-specific future-skills taxonomy for STIP Jakarta and provides a directly deployable curriculum reform prioritization framework.