Recruitment for every position on the ships is critical, and that's from the cook to your ordinary seaman, not to mention the more specialized trades. All job categories are currently in demand. No one has a surfeit of workers.
It can take up to five months to train a seaman and cost up to $50,000. A good number of the training centres are in the United States. Employers incur costs to simply have a cook that can feed their crews, for example.
When you're talking about the more specialized trades, training takes more time. To train a ship captain, you need six to eight years.
The shortages are everywhere. We were talking earlier about sectors poaching employees from one another. That's similar to what is going on a ship in all job categories.