The trades · What you actually sail · IMU CET May 2027

Types of Ships in the Merchant Navy: The Trades You Can Sail

For Class 12 PCM students — Physics, Chemistry, Maths · age 17 to 25 (relaxations apply) · girls and boys. Not PCM? This path is not open to you.

"Merchant Navy" is not one job. A gas carrier, a car carrier and a chemical tanker are three different working lives, three different sets of certificates and three different pay scales. This page is what nobody explains before you choose.

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First question

Why are ships specialised at all?

Because the cargo decides everything. Iron ore is heavy and cheap, so a bulk carrier is a simple steel box built to carry as much as possible for as little as possible. Natural gas has to be held at minus 162 degrees, so an LNG carrier is an insulated pressure vessel with a propulsion plant designed around the cargo itself. A chemical tanker carries forty different liquids that must never touch each other, so it has forty separately coated tanks and its own pumping system for each.

Change the cargo and you change the hull, the pumps, the pipes, the plant, the paperwork and the training. That is why an officer is not simply an officer. You become a tanker officer, or a gas officer, or a container officer — and the trade you pick early tends to follow you.

Size bands below are approximate. Brokers and registries publish slightly different figures, and the boundaries move as ships get bigger. Use them to understand the scale, not to quote in an examination.

Dry cargo

The dry trades

A bulk carrier alongside with its cranes working cargo — Photo credit

Bulk carriers

Iron ore, coal, grain, bauxite, cement — cargo poured into the hold loose. The largest fleet at sea by number, and where a great many Indian officers begin.

Handysize: under about 40,000 dwt
Handymax and Supramax: about 40,000 to 60,000 dwt
Panamax and Kamsarmax: about 65,000 to 82,000 dwt
Capesize: about 100,000 to 200,000 dwt — too big for the Panama Canal
Valemax and Chinamax: up to about 400,000 dwt

Life on board. Longer sea passages, fewer ports, more time on open water. Cargo work is slow, so port stays can be days rather than hours.

A large container ship berthed at a terminal, stacked high with boxes — Photo credit

Container ships

Boxes. Everything you own arrived on one. Fixed schedules, fixed routes, and the most precise timekeeping in shipping.

Feeder: about 300 to 3,000 TEU
Panamax: about 4,000 to 5,000 TEU
Post-Panamax: about 6,000 to 10,000 TEU
Neo-Panamax: up to about 14,000 TEU
Ultra Large Container Vessel: about 18,000 TEU and above

Life on board. Fast turnarounds. You may be alongside eight hours and gone. Liner trades run to a timetable, so you often know where you will be in three weeks.

Ro-Ro and car carriers

Cars, trucks and machinery driven on and driven off. A car carrier is a floating multi-storey garage, twelve or more decks of it.

Life on board. Short, sharp port calls. Careful cargo work — a scratched car is a claim.

General cargo, heavy lift and project

Anything that does not fit a standard box or hold: turbines, bridge sections, yachts, locomotives. Heavy-lift ships carry their own cranes.

Life on board. The most varied cargo work at sea, and the most planning. Every lift is its own problem.

Liquid cargo

The tanker trades

An oil tanker alongside a berth in calm water — Photo credit

Crude oil tankers

Crude from the wellhead to the refinery. The biggest ships afloat by deadweight.

Aframax: about 80,000 to 120,000 dwt
Suezmax: about 120,000 to 200,000 dwt
VLCC: about 200,000 to 320,000 dwt
ULCC: about 320,000 dwt and above

Life on board. Long ballast passages, terminals often far from a town, and an inspection regime stricter than anything ashore. Tanker experience is respected everywhere.

Product tankers

Refined cargo — petrol, diesel, jet fuel, naphtha — from the refinery to the market. Several grades at once, kept apart.

MR, Medium Range: about 25,000 to 55,000 dwt
LR1, Large Range 1: about 45,000 to 80,000 dwt
LR2: about 80,000 dwt and above

Life on board. More port calls than crude, more cargo operations, more paperwork. India runs a large product fleet — Seven Islands alone owns more than twenty.

Chemical tankers

The hardest cargo at sea. Forty or more separate coated or stainless tanks, each with a different cargo, each with its own cleaning requirement before the next one.

Life on board. The most demanding certification and the most technical cargo work of any trade. Officers who do it well are never short of a job.

Gas

The gas trades

The best paid work at sea, and the hardest to get into.

An LNG carrier under way, its containment tanks visible on deck — Photo credit

LNG carriers

Natural gas carried as a liquid at minus 162 degrees Celsius. The ship is a vacuum flask the length of three football pitches.

Life on board. The best paid trade at sea and the hardest to enter. Companies want specific gas experience and specific certificates, and they train their own people into it.

LPG and gas carriers

Propane, butane, ammonia, ethylene — carried under pressure, refrigerated, or both.

Life on board. A common route into gas. Many officers do LPG first and move to LNG later.

Passengers

Carrying people instead of cargo

A cruise ship berthed in a European port — Photo credit

Cruise ships and luxury liners

Several thousand passengers and a crew the size of a village. A deck officer here is running a small floating city as much as a ship: the biggest ships afloat by volume, the largest crews, and the shortest turnarounds.

Small and expedition: under about 500 passengers
Mid-size: about 500 to 2,000 passengers
Large resort ships: about 2,000 to 5,000 passengers
The largest afloat: over 5,000 passengers and a crew above 2,000

Life on board. More people, more ports and shorter contracts than cargo, with a service culture that cargo does not have. Safety drills, passenger management and public-address duties fill the day alongside the navigation.

A large cruise ship alongside at Nagasaki — Photo credit

Two different careers on the same cruise ship

Worth knowing before anyone sells you a cruise job. The deck and engine officers are Merchant Navy officers who came through IMU CET and an approved pre-sea course. The hotel, catering and entertainment crew come through an entirely different route, with a different certificate and different pay. Both are on the same ship; they are not the same career.

Life on board. This page is about the officer route. If someone offers you a cruise job for a fee without a pre-sea course, read what changed on 1 August 2026 first.

Ferries and passenger ships

Short sea crossings, many a day, cars and passengers together.

Life on board. Often the best leave pattern in shipping, because many run to a home port. Intense watchkeeping in confined waters.

Offshore and specialised

Away from the cargo trades

Offshore fleet

Platform supply vessels, anchor handlers, drillships, construction and cable-lay vessels, and the growing wind-farm support fleet.

Life on board. Close-quarters, dynamically positioned work, often within sight of the installation. A different set of certificates and a different rhythm to deep sea.

Specialised and harbour craft

Dredgers, tugs and salvage, research ships, cable layers, reefers, livestock carriers, heavy-lift semi-submersibles.

Life on board. Small fleets, deep expertise, and often a route to shore work in the same speciality.

What it means for you

You do not choose your trade at seventeen.

You choose it when a company offers you a cadetship, and the offer depends on which company selects you. That is worth knowing now, because it is the reason company selection matters as much as the entrance exam. We prepare students for both. Selection rests with the company.

What you can do at seventeen is understand the map, so that when a panel asks which trade interests you and why, you have an answer that is yours. See how we prepare students for company interviews.

And every one of these ships needs a Captain and a Chief Engineer. The ladder from trainee to command · what comes after sea · the papers you will need.

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Pick the exam first. The trade comes later.

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