According to the European Marine Board dossier on the 21st century, marine professionals, graduate programmes and career developments are mainly fragmented and highly specialized, some of which are explicitly marine while other opportunities are often integrated within other disciplines.
In this context, as lead partner and coordinator of the Blue Skills initiative, the Italian National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics - OGS proposes a multidisciplinary training offer on sustainable blue economy to suit the long-term education and short-term upskilling experience, circular mobility and knowledge transfer. Specifically, the Blue Skills initiative promotes opportunities for marine and maritime careers through capacity building, skills development, knowledge exchange, and talent circulation across the Mediterranean. The activities include: an Advanced Master, a Summer School, opportunities for research mobility and a traineeship programme.
The Blue Skills initiative is implemented by OGS on behalf of the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR), within the framework of the Western Mediterranean Forum (Dialogue 5+5). Considered as the Italian contribution to capacity building and circulation of talents in the Mediterranean, the Blue Skills initiative won the WestMED Project Award 2021 and was labelled by the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) in 2019.
