Sailing Ahead — 20th Anniversary

Twenty years ago, the Escola began as a way to convince road hauliers to trust a ship — and the only argument that ever worked was putting them on deck. This October, that same instinct takes us back to sea, retracing the ports that founded us.

By Eduard Rodés, Director, Escola Europea – Intermodal Transport

Written by: Eduard Rodés, Director of the Escola Europea

Twenty years ago the Escola began as a conversation between people who trusted one another: the Ports of Barcelona, Rome (Civitavecchia) and Genoa, together with Grimaldi Lines and Grandi Navi Veloci. It is worth being honest about what we were trying to do. The first courses were not conceived as education at all; they were a way of promoting a service. We were convinced that short sea shipping worked, and the people we most needed to convince were road hauliers — operators whose entire working life was built around not using a ship.

You cannot argue somebody out of that with a presentation. What you can do is take them to the quay, put them on board and let them watch the operation happen around them.

That turned out to be a better idea than the one we had. Almost immediately, what we had designed for professionals already in the sector was reinterpreted for everyone arriving in it, and for those who simply wanted to bring their knowledge up to date. The commercial argument had become a method. In those first years we spent a great deal of time explaining why a classroom should sometimes be a ship. We no longer have to explain it. More than 25,000 participants have done that for us.

This October we mark the anniversary the way we began it: on the water. We will board ships in Barcelona and sail, in person, to Civitavecchia, Palermo and Genoa — the very ports that founded us. So when we say we are Sailing Ahead, it is not a metaphor. It is the itinerary.

What people actually remember

If you ask anyone who has taken one of our courses what they remember, they seldom begin with the content. They begin with a person. Some of our trainers come from universities and some spend the rest of the week in a terminal, a shipping line or a customs office, and I have never been able to predict which of them a group will remember. We mix our groups as far as we are able — nationalities, companies, sometimes direct competitors — and people who arrive as strangers leave having shared a classroom, a quayside and a dinner table. We put a great deal of care into designing modules. What participants carry home is one another.

That is why we have always been willing to put people somewhere they did not expect: a theatre exercise, a piece of music, a simulation running inside a platform that exists nowhere else. The formats are not the point. They are what it takes to get a room full of professionals to stop performing their job titles for long enough to meet each other. It is the same discovery we made in the first year, applied to new material.

What the pandemic forced us to learn

None of it was really tested until it had to be. In our second decade the pandemic removed almost everything our model depended on: immersion, direct contact with ports and vessels, the experiential learning that had defined us from the beginning. For a while we had to hold on to our structure without being able to practise our essence. It forced a reinvention we had not planned, and with the European Union’s support through the YEP MED project it is where much of what we now call phygital actually began — not as a trend we adopted, but as a constraint we had to build our way through.

Port Virtual Lab lets trainees run simulated companies inside a digital environment built to mirror real port operations. PLIKA connects a knowledge network across the Mediterranean. This year we introduced AI training for port-logistics communities, because ignoring the tool was not an option and neither was letting it replace what matters: judgement, presence and human connection. That is the thinking behind Education Beyond Intelligence, our anniversary training programme — modules on theatre, on music, on ethics, built on the conviction that technology should sharpen a person’s discernment rather than stand in for it.

Education, like music

I have come to think of education the way I think of music: both ephemeral and lasting. Every course ends. Every group goes home. And yet something stays — a way of understanding intermodality, a sensitivity to sustainability, the habit of asking not only whether something works but whether it should.

The six stars in our anniversary logo — imagination, dialogue, self-determination, effort, trust, wisdom — were chosen to describe the people who built this place. They borrow from Areté, and we have never been much interested in defining virtue in the abstract. It is easier to point at it. As of this autumn, our address in Barcelona is Jardins de l’Areté, 1. Twenty years of work, and the word ends up on the post. There are worse ways to be reminded of what you said you stood for.

Next month we sail to the ports that made us, and I suspect the conversations on board will be the same ones we have been having since 2006: what should we teach, and how. We began by asking road hauliers to trust a ship, and the only argument that ever worked was letting them stand on the deck. Twenty years later the answer is still not technological. The next twenty will belong to whoever keeps asking, course by course, which parts of learning have to stay in the room.