Half a million work hours and a million parts. The shipbuilder is a profession of the future again

When Wicher's hull lifted free on the waters of Gdańsk Bay on Thursday, the cameras followed the ship, the barge and the tugs. But behind every one of those minutes stood years of work by the people talked about least. Preparing Poland's first new frigate for launch consumed more than half a million work hours, and PGZ Stocznia Wojenna chief executive Marcin Ryngwelski, welcoming guests to Wednesday's christening, addressed his warmest words to the yard's workers, stressing that it is above all people who stand behind Wicher's construction and that he watches their work every day with great pride. It is a good moment to say it out loud: in Poland, the shipbuilder is once again a profession of the future.

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13 august 2026   |   15:03   |   Source: Gazeta Morska   |   Prepared by: Kamil Kusier   |   Print

fot. Mikołaj Bujak / KPRP

Numbers with people behind them

The scale of the work done in Gdynia is best captured by the figures cited at the christening. The completed Wicher will consist of more than a million parts. Over 700 kilometres of cabling has been laid in the roughly 6,500-tonne hull - about the distance from Gdynia to Kraków. Around 100 tonnes of welding consumables and 50,000 litres of paint have been used. Each of the two propellers weighs more than 10 tonnes, and the shaft lines are about half a football pitch long.

Behind every one of those items stands a specific trade: the loftsman, the welder, the hull fitter, the pipefitter, the marine electrician, the painter, the crane operator, the production engineer, the designer. Half a million work hours is no abstraction - it is the daily routine of hundreds of people who, shift after shift for three years, joined sections in the assembly hall, pulled kilometres of cable runs and fitted the foundations for systems yet to arrive.

A trade back in the game

For a century, Gdynia has been built on three inseparable pillars: the Navy, the port and the shipbuilding industry - as Marcin Ryngwelski reminded guests at the christening, encouraging young people to tie their futures to all three. After years in which Polish yards made headlines more often for their troubles than their successes, that triangle is working at full capacity again. PGZ Stocznia Wojenna alone has grown its workforce from 560 to more than 900 people and says it will reach at least 1,200, while the trade, as its chief executive stresses, has once again become financially attractive.

- The shipbuilder's trade is enjoying a renaissance; we have plenty of orders for ships, and we lack skilled workers - Marcin Ryngwelski said during Gdynia's Shipbuilder's Day and Navy Day celebrations.

Work booked seven years ahead

This is no courtesy line - it is the hard arithmetic of the order book. In the Tricity alone, nine ships for the Polish Navy are currently under construction: the three Miecznik-class frigates, the rescue ship Ratownik, Kormoran II-class minehunters and Delfin-class signals intelligence vessels. Add to that civilian vessels, offshore structures and repair work.

- We are so booked up with work that we are turning shipowners away. We have work seven years ahead, and there are no people - Marcin Ryngwelski said in May this year.

And he added the point that best shows the length of that horizon: whoever starts university today will graduate exactly when the yards finish building the ordered ships - and that is when work for further decades begins, because building a vessel accounts for only around 25 percent of the budget of its whole life cycle. The rest is maintenance, repairs and upgrades, which for ships serving 40-50 years means secure employment into the middle of the century. The industry is meanwhile grappling with a generation gap: the experienced hands who remember the heyday of Polish yards are retiring faster than their successors arrive.

A shipyard is more than welders

The modern shipyard long ago ceased to be a place of heavy manual work alone. Alongside the welders, fitters and painters who remain its foundation work design offices, production engineers, systems integration specialists and a growing number of IT professionals. As Marcin Ryngwelski has observed, shipyards are associated mainly with the welder, the fitter and the painter, while few people know that almost every large yard in the world runs a thriving IT department - programmers, systems architects, testers and network administrators, in Gdynia working closely with the OBR Centrum Techniki Morskiej research centre. Digitalisation, automation and shipboard electronics mean the industry's doors now stand open to graduates of fields no one would once have connected with a shipyard.

From trade school to technical college: a craft in hand

The road to the shipyard does not have to run through university - and for most shipyard trades, it does not. The industry's foundation remains the trade schools of the first and second degree, training welders, hull fitters, mechanics, electricians and crane operators, together with technical colleges offering shipbuilding and mechanical profiles. Pomerania has an exceptional base for this tradition: Gdańsk's Conradinum, one of the oldest technical schools in Poland, has trained shipbuilding technicians for generations, while the Maritime Schools Complex in Gdańsk prepares students for seagoing trades from navigation to engine-room operation.

Crucially, the yards are not waiting passively for graduates: they cooperate with schools and offer work placements and internships, and chief executive Marcin Ryngwelski speaks openly of the need to train successive generations of specialists in cooperation with schools and universities. For a young person, that means a path in which a craft earned at a technical college or trade school leads to a job straight after graduation, in a trade that is once again financially attractive, with an order book stretching to the middle of the next decade.

Maritime schools and universities

For those aiming higher or switching careers, the offer is just as broad: the Maritime School in Gdynia runs courses and maritime training opening the way to work aboard vessels, Gdynia Maritime University and Gdańsk University of Technology educate engineers in ocean engineering, shipbuilding and ship systems, and the Polish Naval Academy trains both military and civilian specialists. The industry is meanwhile appealing to local governments to develop technical education, because the ships built today will need maintaining for the next half-century and workforce planning must run decades ahead - and the debate now even includes the idea of building a second yard capable of producing warships, which would mean demand for hundreds more workers.

Wicher, launched on Thursday, will remain in shipbuilders' hands for years to come - outfitting, systems integration and trials all lie ahead. And after her, Burza, Huragan, Ratownik and whatever comes next. A hundred years after Tadeusz Wenda and Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski staked everything on Gdynia, the trade that built the city once again has a future to match those times. All it needs is people willing to reach for it.

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praca w stoczni pracuj na morzu PGZ Stocznia Wojenna Marcin Ryngwelski przemysł stoczniowy

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