Identification and Prioritization of Educational Needs of PMO Employees for Ships’ Ballast Water Management

This research has been done to survey, identification, and prioritization the educational needs of the employees at the Ports and Maritime Organization in the implementation of the contents of the ship's ballast water management convention in Iran. This research has been "functional" in terms of purpose and "descriptive" in terms of data collection method and of the type "survey". Documentary method was used to access the research literature and a researcher-made questionnaire was used for collecting data which the content validity of the questionnaire was provided by the opinions of 22 experts and its reliability was also confirmed by Cronbach's alpha coefficient above 0.70. The statistical society of this research included 700 managers and experts in port and shipping lines, ship's personnel and crew members, experts in the field of international maritime law and environmental experts that by citing of Morgan table and random sampling method, 248 subjects out of aforementioned people were selected. The methods of descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the collected data. In the inferential statistics section, Friedman test was used and the data were analyzed by using of SPSS23 software. Based on the results, there is a significant difference between the average rankings of knowledge, attitude and skill areas which the results showed that the known educational needs of the knowledge area are in the first rank and then the educational needs of all three areas were prioritized and finally suggestions were presented in accordance with the objectives and results of the research.