The Escola Europea promotes short sea shipping and sustainable transport at Spain’s biggest logistics fair – SIL

The Escola Europea – Intermodal Transport has participated in the International Logistics Show of Barcelona – the annual logistics fair in Spain. Sharing a stand with one of its main shareholders –the Port of Barcelona­-, the Escola presented its training offer for the second semester of 2018 and promoted some of its projects; highlighting the growing influence and success of TransLogMED and Forma’t al Port.

In a presentation held on the last day of the fair, Ricardo Garcia highlighted the importance of short sea shipping and the motorways of the sea in the continued development of the Mediterranean corridor and the need to improve sustainable transport. With this in mind, the Escola has launched the TransLogMED project jointly with the Union for the Mediterranean. Through the promotion of international cooperation in transport transactions and by providing training in intermodal transport that knows no borders, the project aims to enhance the competencies and capabilities of transport and logistics operators from the Northern and Southern shores of the Mediterranean basin. The project has a scheduled lifeline of four years and will organise conferences and courses to implement its objectives.

In terms of its training offer, in the summer months the Escola will hold the second edition of its technical training for professionals, focused on Groupage Operations and Consolidation Centres (18-20 of June). This course will be followed by an edition of Escola’s SURCO Operations I, focusing on rail- maritime intermodality, which will take place in Barcelona between the 2nd and 4th of July. In mid-July it will be the time of the Escola’s first ever Summer School on Port Operations (9-13 of July), a course designed for all kinds of profiles, professional, academic or vocational. Finally, in the autumn, two editions of the Escola’s unique Motorways of the Sea Training (MOST) course will take place. The first of these, MOST Italy, will take place between the 29th of September and the 2nd of October and will focus on the intermodal routes with short sea shipping maritime links in Italy. The second course MOST Iberia (20-23 October) will take a closer look at the intermodal transport situation across the Iberian peninsula.

The Escola has been complementing its intermodal training package with the Forma’t al Port project, whose goal is to bring young students closer to the professional field of the port communities. For the past three years the Escola has worked with Catalan training centres on professional work experience programmes. The courses have been hugely successful and will now be extended to Italian centres through a sister project Formati al Porto.