Skills on Board – Soft skills for professional skippers in a changing tourism industry Erasmus Project

Project Title

Skills on Board – Soft skills for professional skippers in a changing tourism industry

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Overcoming skills mismatches (basic/transversal)

Project Summary

Tourism is at the same time one of the largest employer across EU countries, supporting approx. 25 million jobs, and also, one of the economy sectors where the relevant industry cannot excel and safeguard a leading position worldwide, without continuously improving the quality of the staff involved in order to be able to provide high quality, personalised services to tourists. Tourism is changing at the demand side, and competitiveness relies more and more on skills of its human capital, which have to correspond to new modes of customer behaviour and expectations. (DG Growth – Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs,). In particular, in the field of touristic services, new trends are lately gaining considerable momentum, which are articulated within the so-called “experience economy”. These trends are referring to a heightened demand for the provision of memorable experiences to customers, which was always at the core of tourism, but now is becoming even more specialised. Adventure tourism, cultural tourism, maritime tourism are forms of tourism where these trends flourish in the ongoing evolution from mass tourism to niche tourism. The nature of the provided services to match the expectations of the tourists for experience-rich memories should eventually be ‘orchestrated’ by tourism businesses and professionals, turning memories into products for the supply side of tourism. (Mapping and performance check of the supply side of tourism education and training, February 2016 – EUROPEAN COMMISSION). In order for professionals in the tourism sector to respond to these new trends, there is a set of soft skills and abilities that should be developed or further enhanced, relating rather to personal and social competences, ranging beyond, and complementing job-specific skills in each case.
Within this frame, which portrays the changing nature of tourism, the proposed project is targeting a specific segment of maritime tourism, and in particular the leisure yachting industry in the EU and the yacht skippers and crew, as employed by it. In the aforementioned reports and studies by the respective EU bodies (i.e. DG Growth – Tourism, Support to tourism business, Professional skills and Mapping and performance check of the supply side of tourism education and training, February 2016 – EC) it has been well-documented, that beyond the diversity and variations observed in EU Member-States in the required hard, job-specific skills of professional yacht skippers (e.g. navigation, marine engineering and electronics, meteorology, maritime traffic rules etc.), there are significant gaps and shortages relating to soft skills, which eventually account for both improving the image of the touristic profession of a skipper, as well as for guaranteeing the provision of high quality, integrated and personalised services to the tourists along the new trends in tourism. Sailing and yachting are recognised as having a high potential, especially vis-à-vis the growing interest in high added value, alternative forms of tourism.

The proposed project will develop a modular set of educational material available in an online learning space (in EN, ES, EL, HR, BL) fostering in particular the acquisition and/or development of soft skills for professional yacht skippers and crew across the following indicative subjects:
– Understanding of how the new trends in tourism on the demand side are shaping the scope and purpose of the touristic services on the supply side in leisure yachting tourism
– Acquisition or development of certain sets of transversal skills and attitudes at the personal, interpersonal/societal level of the professional skippers to correspond to those new trends
The primary target group of the project are the professional skippers and crew in:
• skippered yacht charters (rented boat and services of a skipper by tourists);
• crewed yacht charter (rented boat, services of a skipper and crew e.g. cook, deckhands by tourists);
• flotilla yachting (company of boats managed by a skipper in a skippered yacht).
Secondary target groups are indicatively as follows:
• Yacht charting and touristic agencies;
• Skipper and yacht training centres etc. (post-secondary, non-tertiary);
• VET schools and organisations providing vocational training in maritime and touristic professions;
• Institutional and regulatory bodies in tourism and maritime leisure in particular.
The project objectives are thus to strengthen key soft skills of professional skippers towards:
• New skills for new tourism demands (e.g. personalised services) for competitiveness;
• Providing tools and methodologies for the tackling of key skills gap, especially regarding transversal skills, and compensating for low levels of training for professionals in the leisure yachting industry;
• Enhancement of poor image of tourism careers;
Facilitating mobility of professional skippers on the basis of new trends in tourism, and the required skills associated with these tre

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 231907 Eur

Project Coordinator

OIKONOMIKO KOLLEGIO ATHINON S.A. & Country: EL

Project Partners

• Sea Teach S.L.
• POMORSKI FAKULTET U RIJECI
• Bulgarian Maritime Training Centre
• Institut za turizam
• Black Sea Research Programme-NOAH
• MILITOS SYMVOULEUTIKI A.E.
• GEORGIOS MARKOGIANNIS & SIA OE – INMER EKPAIDEYTIKI SYMVOYLOI EPIXEIRISEON