NMP trains 19,550 seafarers

TACLOBAN CITY — The National Maritime Polytechnic (NMP) is set to significantly exceed its annual goals, reporting training figures that are already nearing the total output from the previous year.

In the first three quarters of 2025, the NMP, which operates from its Tacloban headquarters and a Manila liaison office, trained a total of 19,550 active and aspiring seafarers.

This figure is close to the 19,652 successful trainees reported for the entire year 2024 and nearly doubles the school’s 2025 target of 10,000 trainees.

NMP executive director Victor del Rosario said the output demonstrates the agency’s “unwavering dedication” to its mandate of producing globally competitive Filipino seafarers.

“We will continue to enhance our training capacities to meet international standards and sustain the country’s position as the world’s leading supplier of maritime professionals,” Del Rosario said.

The state-run institution has seen a surge in enrollment since the pandemic. It successfully trained 34,374 individuals in 2023 and 2024 alone, a figure substantially higher than the combined 28,674 trainees recorded during the three-year period from 2020 to 2022, which was constrained by Covid-19 restrictions.

As of August 2025, the NMP stands out among the 91 Maritime Industry Authority-accredited maritime training institutions as the only government-owned center. It offers 56 maritime training courses, including mandatory, non-mandatory, deck, engine and specialized courses. Thirty-two of these courses are available to seafarers free of charge.

Since beginning its training operations in 1983, the NMP has trained a total of 464,434 Filipino seafarers.