Owning a capability and using it are different achievements. The distance between the two is where budgets drain and good intentions stall.

Nothing on a dashboard has ever steered a vessel. A number matters only when someone with judgement acts on it in time.

The strongest fleets belong to leaders who ask what a tool changes before asking what it can do.

Shipping has been asking what technology can do for it. The hiring market is now asking a harder question: who is meant to make it happen?

The evidence sits in the job titles. One shipping group bringing vessel management in-house has a handful of spreadsheets and no defined technology budget. A maritime technology business with more than 100 engineers is midway through a cloud transformation. Both are looking for a Director of Technology. The label is identical and the work is not.

Pay tells the same story. Senior expectations run from around £90,000 to more than £450,000, a spread that suggests buyers and candidates are pricing different jobs under one name. The role itself has grown by accretion. Each new demand from the business went into the brief and nothing ever came out. The result is a specification few people can meet and no organisation has actually decided it needs.

That matters well beyond recruitment. Digitalisation and decarbonisation programmes both run through these leaders. When the hire fails or never arrives the programme waits with it, and owners are left with data they cannot use and compliance decisions made without a technology voice in the room.

The more useful reading is that the unicorn is a symptom of an unmade decision. An owner who cannot say whether the role is to build an engineering function or steer a transformation or bring shipping literacy to a technology team has not yet defined the problem. Capability can be assembled across several people. Clarity cannot be outsourced to one.

The practical answer is unglamorous. Decide first which problem the business needs solved. Then hire for that and build the rest of the capability around it, perhaps by seating technologists beside chartering and operations so they learn the trade from the people living it. The leaders who succeed in this market may be those who stop searching for someone who knows everything.

On 15 October, the Digital Ship Summit brings together maritime technology leaders to tackle the decisions shaping shipping’s digital future.

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