The Colombo International Nautical and Engineering College, or more popularly known as CINEC is a private higher education institute that specializes in maritime education and training. In fact, it is the largest such facility to have been approved by the Directorate of Merchant Shipping in Sri Lanka. Founded in 1990, the institute has gone from strength to strength over the years, creating new career opportunities for young men and women from all parts of the country. We met with CINEC’s president, Captain Ajith Peiris to understand more about CINEC and the qualifications it offers.
What was the thinking behind setting up a higher educational facility of this nature in Sri Lanka?
The major business activity of the Ceyline Group of Companies in which I am the Executive Chairman and was involved since 1988, is crew recruitment and management of seafarers mainly on foreign ships. Basically, we represent certain foreign / local ship owners who are interested in recruiting Sri Lankan seafarers on their ships. I noticed that there was a good demand in the international market for Sri Lankan seafarers with proper training and education. When a country develops, the tendency for its people to go out to sea on ships as a livelihood ceases, because the wage gap between what they can earn from a job on land and what they would earn out at sea tends to narrow. Therefore, they prefer to stay at home with family because there is no real incentive to take up seafaring. This opens up opportunities for developing countries like ours, because the ship owners from the developed countries like to employ foreign employees at competitive rates, because they are unable to find skilled people from their own countries even at a higher cost. I saw this as a very important opportunity for the Sri Lankan youth.
At that time the training of officers and engineers was conducted by the University of Moratuwa through an NTD programme, and certain seaman training programmes were conducted by the Sri Lanka Navy in Trincomalee. Our plan was to supply employees to the international market on merchant navy ships which meant that our training had to be different to what was already in place, which was not very aligned with the international demand. Although we had discussions with the relevant authorities to change the curriculum to be more relevant, those discussions were not very successful. Then, I proposed to my other two business partners to start an Academy on our own, and that marked the beginning of CINEC. We started on a very small scale, with two classrooms in our own office building in Colpetty, and for practicals we used to go to the port, the fire brigade and various other places. Such was our very humble beginning.
How did your growth story evolve over the years?
This Maritime programme comes under the Ministry of Shipping. It does not fall under the jurisdiction of the University Grants Commission. However, later on when we wanted to add a degree programme for marine engineering and maritime sciences, then we had to get the permission from the UGC which makes us the only UGC-approved institute to offer these degrees in the country.
We started off with a programme to train cadets and send them on ships, so they were basically like trainee officers. There were two streams, the navigation stream and the engineering stream. If one chooses the navigation stream, they will end up as ship captains and those who follow the engineering streams will end up as chief engineers. Recently we introduced another stream, electrical engineering. Anyway, the challenge was to make foreign ship owners accept and acknowledge our training and absorb our cadets on to their fleet so that the trainees get the required practical exposure. Luckily though, given our good reputation with our foreign principals, who are top class German and other international ship owners, from the very inception we managed to secure positions for our trainees. . Our first batch was about 25 cadets. At present, for a year we have student registrations of about 20,000 across all categories. As the class sizes were growing, and our business activities also were expanding, we had to start looking for a larger space to shift our training arm. We came across an almost-abandoned premises called the Fisheries Training Institute in Mattakkuliya, and entered into a 33-year lease agreement with the Ministry of Fisheries to utilize that facility. We also agreed to help them start their own programme with our support. After several years of occupying that facility, we decided to look for our own space, and we found this current location at Malabe. These buildings were added one by one, as we expanded. We have a total of 9 acres now which is the double of what we started off with. We currently have 2 acres of land available for further expansion. Our growth has been a gradual process. It is with humble pride that I say that we are the only institute in Sri Lanka offering the Certificate of Competence Class 1 for both the navigation and engineering streams.
While competence is key in maritime qualifications, we wanted to ensure that it is also central to our non-marine programmes. Our programme diversification strategy was built on a vision of “professionalism with competence” – that is the ability to complete a given task. Given our maritime background, we highly value competence and discipline, and our goal is to impart these values to all our students, irrespective of what stream they choose. The important point is that we never took short cuts. We never focused on only increasing our profits. Instead we focused our energies on improving quality. Whatever we have earned in the initial two decades was reinvested in this organization, in the form of people, infrastructure, equipment etc.
Do you have an international student population?
That is something we are currently focused on. Back when we only offered maritime courses, we had students from Maldives , Iran, India and Bangladesh, but the numbers were not large. Our focus now is to make this institute a hub for maritime and non-maritime education. We are canvassing for students from Nepal, Maldives , Myanmar and China. In fact, we have got the first Chinese student now. On the other hand, we want to keep our Sri Lankan students in the country, by offering them a solid foreign qualification at home. Our attempt is to help minimize brain drain, and the loss of talented individuals. Our certificates with foreign affiliation do not mention anywhere that the training was conducted in Colombo. Therefore, the qualification is accepted globally.
Speaking of our students in general, we have produced a multitude of ship captains and chief engineers. In fact, more than 80 per cent of those who become ship captains and chief engineers actually go through this programme. Our satisfaction is in seeing the large spillover effects these jobs generate. You can see their families, and sometimes even their villages benefiting through these individuals. This community remits about USD 300 million dollars per annum to this country, and this is a source of foreign income that has gained little or no recognition at all. The beauty is when people coming from villages earning very good salaries on ships support their families, and communities; an entire village can benefit from just one person taking to the sea. This is our ultimate satisfaction.
A cadet who joins us today after Advanced Levels, or our Foundation Course (for those who do not have the Advanced Level qualification), after 3 years of training and the apprenticeship on board a ship with the Certificate of Competence Class 3 certification, can sail as a third or second officer. The salary for these ranks are around USD 2000. Who will earn this much of money per month on land? Even a director from a reputable company might not be drawing this salary.
It is very encouraging that there is still a significant demand for well-trained officers in the international market, which means we have a huge potential. However, we also need to market ourselves well. Currently, we are pushing the government to join hands with us in marketing our sea farers to maritime nations such as Japan, Korea, Greece and Germany, who own large fleets of ships and are looking to employ foreign officers.
What we have to realise is that a large employment segment can be opened up by focusing on this area. We offer continuous education up to the Certificate of Competence Class 1 certification, which is all that is needed to be employed on a ship. However, if someone wants to get into a degree programme after that, they can become enrolled in the degree programme. We are also offering MBAs on the maritime front, for students who might be interested in getting into office jobs.
What is the awareness level among the broader student community about this qualification and career avenue?
We conduct many awareness programmes. We go to educational exhibitions on our own, and we talk at individual schools, take part in talk shows in electronic media, and publish articles on print media. However, we are capable of doing a lot more, and government involvement would be a major support in generating greater awareness than we can achieve on our own. We are currently trying to see whether we could use certain outlets in rural areas to promote our programmes. We have been involved in a lot of projects through NGOS in various parts of the country, and we use these connections also to promote and create awareness about these qualifications. What we have to realize is that students from the more affluent urban areas now tend to go abroad for studies, or prefer to be engaged in other kinds of academic qualifications. What we really see is that increasingly more suburban and rural students are keen to take up these marine qualifications. This is an excellent trend, because these rural economies will gain a huge growth impetus as a result.
How do you ensure that the standards are maintained from batch to batch?
We have several quality systems in place. Our systems are competent and quality driven, so we take quality assurance very seriously. Furthermore, we also have to abide by certain standards of international systems, which are monitored by the Director General of Shipping from the Ministry. These are in addition to our own quality systems. We are also certified by the prestigious DNV – GL in Norway, which means that we have to maintain a given level of standards at all times.
However, it is one thing to have systems in place, but it is a completely different thing to believe in ourselves and maintain the quality of programmes. If we do not invest in quality, all we are issuing is a paper certificate. We really cannot expect to continue and make our programmes popular with just a paper qualification.
What are the plans for the future of CINEC?
I think we have achieved the highest level possible on the maritime front. Therefore, what we are now looking at is to diversify our educational programmes. About 12 years ago, we started the non-marine stream and introduced engineering degree programmes affiliated to the University of Wolverhampton and logistics and transportation programmes affiliated to the Dalian Maritime University. Thus, progress has been made, and now our delivery on the maritime and non-maritime programmes are roughly equal. Going forward, our aim is to have two brands; one CINEC Maritime Campus in which we have made our mark, and a second for our non-maritime programmes under the brand CINEC Campus. We do not want to dilute the CINEC maritime brand we have created, which is why we want to promote CINEC as a different arm under which many different programmes will be offered. These include civil, mechanical, mechatronics, electronic and communication engineering programs as well as automobile, aviation, hospitality logistics , management and tourism programmes. The best example to showcase that we do not take short cuts under any circumstances is our aviation programme. The moment we started this programme, we purchased a lear jet from the US, and it is parked here for students to have hands on practice – they go inside, do practicals with the engine, etc – so that they are not limited to just a classroom experience. Even for the marine engineering programmes, we use real engines and simulators. We firmly believe that competence comes with hands on experience. We do not believe in producing engineers who do not have the skill for basic technical jobs.
A comment on the panel of lecturers?
When we started the maritime stream, recruiting lecturers was a challenge because we cannot expect ship captains and Chief Engineers to have lecturing skills. On the other hand, we did not want to hire individuals who have never been at sea to teach our students how to sail a ship. However, now that our programmes are popular, many people want to join CINEC to teach. We have a train the trainer programme to help such individuals sharpen their lecturing skills. Retaining a good panel of lecturers is also difficult, because they earn so much at sea, and it is not possible for us to match those salaries. It is a challenge, but we go all out to get the best panel of lecturers. Even on the non-marine stream, we look for lecturers with exposure. For example, if they have work experience outside Sri Lanka, we take that as an added qualification. Resource personnel are key in an educational institution. There is no point in having attractive buildings, if there are no good lecturers.
What is the message that you have for potential future students?
The objective of CINEC is to produce balanced citizens who will contribute to the economy and do a good job of work. To that end, we will provide our students with the education, skills, proper aptitude and attitude and discipline For the employer, our students will be in high demand, because they know that when they hire somebody who has studied at CINEC, those students have had the best exposure. We take pride in knowing that up to now nearly all of our students are gainfully employed, mainly because of the talents they showcase during their internships which help them secure jobs. This demonstrates clearly that we offer qualifications on competence which are highly valued in the job market.