Blue Careers

Topic description

Specific Challenge:

This topic promotes innovative approaches to strengthen the cooperation between industry and education in order to bridge the gap between skills' offer and demand.

The applicant's choice of sector and action has to be based on an analysis of the needs of the labour market and of the industry, including at cross-border level. In order to ensure that supported activities take due account of clearly identified needs, projects should bring together stakeholders from both the industry, education and training providers (both at higher and vocational level).

Furthermore, projects should enhance the visibility and attractiveness of the different career opportunities in the blue economy, especially for young people.

In the context of the above general objectives, proposals submitted under this topic must provide concrete and effective responses to at least one of the following challenges:

1. Lack of entrepreneurial skills, including social entrepreneurial skills of graduates at both higher education and vocational education and training (VET) levels. Students need to be better equipped with advanced technical^[1] as well as soft skills^[2] enabling them to develop new ideas and products, and possibly launch their own start-up. Lack of profiles with strong adaptation capacity, able to update their skills to future needs that are still unknown;

2. Lack of structured, defined and continued collaboration between industry and education/training in order to ensure that curricula and training programmes are actually meeting industry needs; lack of industry involvement and leading companies to re-train internally the graduates; difficulties in attracting a sufficient number of competent lecturers with work experience in the maritime industry; difficulties in keeping employees as full-time workers in the companies;

Lack of “skills ecosystems” at sea basin level between education, industry and public authorities (knowledge triangle), to support trans-regional innovation strategies.

For this topic, we seek to fund projects that will develop innovative solutions relating to at least one of the following themes. Projects may cover more than one of these themes:

1. Introducing innovative teaching and training methodologies to boost entrepreneurial skills and equip graduates with suitable soft skills to develop their own ideas, products and start-ups. Links with incubators, innovation hubs, social enterprises and early-stage investors are encouraged. Industry should be involved from the start of the project by shaping together the actions, putting forward a social or technological challenge and following it up with the most successful students;

2. Promoting structured and permanent collaboration frameworks between industry and education, whereby the most recent technological and market developments are directly integrated into the educational offer, enabling to reply to labour market needs. Training should be more practice-oriented and flexible. Qualitative apprenticeships should be promoted, combining substantial work based learning in companies and other workplaces with learning based in education or training institutions^[3]. Professionals from industry should be constantly present during the educational path of students and more synergies between teachers and professionals from industry should be foreseen (for example through hybrid teaching^[4]);

3. Creating education-industry-public authorities networks at sea basin level to map existing educational activities, enable pooling and sharing of best practices as well as of human and physical capital (e.g. training simulators,), develop common training programmes, and foster transnational mobility of learners and teachers. These networks could be set up within already established ones.

Applicants have to list the main results^[5] expected from the project. The expected results to be achieved by the end of the project must be concrete, realistic and quantified as far as possible.

Proposals must clearly describe the specific results of the project from the list below, according to the theme(s) pursued:

• New synergies and structured cooperation between education and training institutions on the one hand and maritime industry on the other;

• Improved employability of students thanks to acquisition of entrepreneurial and soft skills, and to better mentoring and career guidance schemes;

• Development of new ideas from students that could be further developed within incubators or companies;

• New and accessible pathways facilitating career advancement and job mobility within the blue economy;

• New and highly visible training opportunities (including career guidance) allowing professionals to acquire the right skills to find a job in the blue economy;

• Better pooling and sharing of resources between different educational institutes and companies and national and trans-national level;

Increased awareness of ocean issues and increased visibility and attractiveness of blue career opportunities for students from secondary and higher education in general.

[1]Example of advanced technical skills are IT tool management, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, robotics, mechanics, 3D printing, big data management, remote operation of new devices.

[2]Examples of soft skills are communication, analysis of complex issues and problem solving, working in team, resilience, leadership.

[3]Council Recommendation on a European Framework for Quality and Effective Apprenticeships, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A2017%3A563%3AFIN

[4]Hybrid teaching allows employees from the industry to become certified teachers at VET or higher educational institutes, through an accreditation process depending on national systems. This process allows employees to work part time in the company and part-time in the educational institute.

[5]Results: capture more direct, short to medium term changes in a situation, which are achieved by the end of the project. E.g. if four FTE jobs are expected to be created by the end of the project, this will be an expected project result.