Now entering its final months, the YEP MED project shows no signs of slowing down. With its already tried and tested strategy of consolidating both academic and technical education offers with professional training and experiential needs, the project’s courses have already trained 2,952 students since its inception. One of the goals of the project is to help 420 find jobs, and as of November 2022, 338 students have already begun internships or entered employment following the successful completion of the online and in-person training requirements in the participating courses.

Taking a closer look at Spain, this number remains significant. Within the Catalan region, the project’s lead partner – the Escola Europea – has seen 846 number of YEP MED students successfully pass through its doors. Marta Miquel – the Chief Operations Officer at the Escola is one of the teachers that offers training classes in our courses.

It is absolutely amazing to be able to see how enthusiastic the young people are who apply to join the project. I have been teaching at the Escola since I joined in 2015, and I know how diverse the groups that are sent from Universities can be. When we started to offer the occupational training courses to the local youths graduating high school, I noticed that they were genuinely interested in experiencing any workforce environments.

In the beginning it was a bit tricky as Covid had begun and we could only connect with them virtually (and as we all know, there are different profiles of students and for some, the virtual way is not ideal). Once we began to bring the students to the port terminals, and to our physical classrooms, I could see how hungry these students were for real-life experiences.

It has been a learning curve for all of us – developing the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) platform to help the students perform the freight forwarding operations themselves was challenging and not without pitfalls. The students’ flexibility and resourcefulness has helped tremendously – even when they were faced with technical difficulties they prevailed. We all know that these kinds of troubles will happen when they enter employment, so – as stressful it was at the time – I know that it gave them more “on the ground” experiences.

Another thing that stood out for me is the number of girls who applied. Being a woman in the industry– I find myself in the minority quite frequently. It was very encouraging to see young girls motivated to join the world of transport and logistics – and I believe that it bodes well for the future.

I can see that now both myself and the colleagues that offer other courses in the training have grown alongside these students. Being able to share out technical and practical knowledge reassured us that the new “recruits” – so-to-speak – will be able to help plan realistic and innovative logistic solutions in the near future. This would not have been possible without the YEP MED Project – and for that I am very grateful to have been on the team that was so influential to so many.

Marta Miquel is a teacher at the YEP MED courses. She teaches Port Logistics & Management, Intermodal Transport and Environment and transport. Moreover, under the YEP MED framework, she also mentors students on the Port Virtual Lab (PVL) simulator during the courses.