Ok, it seems I misspoke earlier when I claimed that the max rank for a
crewmember was 8. It actually is 7, which caused a few bug reports. Since it
seems that the stat has remained unchanged since ships came in, I am choosing
to leave it at 7.

Therefore, if you have 4 trainers in a particular class (or the equivalent), I
will be willing to strip the 'trainer' ability from one of your crewmembers,
and refund the 50k extra cost in ship credits.

Now, the max level can be exceeded in a couple of situations: unique
crewmembers have their rank set at creation, and can be most any rank. In
addition, there's a special ability (which has not been given out yet, and
which does not occur on the typical crew you hire from trainers) which also
allows an individual crewmember to exceed the max rank by xxx levels.

Melemkor