From skills gaps to blue growth

🌊 Do we have the skills and competences needed for the blue economy we want to build in the next 5, 10 or 20 years?

This was the question I used to open the SA SKILLS High-Level Panel “Improving Skills Availability for the South Adriatic Blue Economy”, which I had the pleasure of moderating during AdriBioPro2026 in Kotor.

The discussion brought together perspectives from EUSAIR, the Interreg IPA South Adriatic Programme, higher education, public institutions and the blue economy community.

Our conversation moved through the full skills-development chain:
Policy → Programme → Education → Ecosystem → Flexible instruments → Qualifications → Practical delivery

We discussed how to:
🔹 better align education and training with labour-market needs
🔹 strengthen practical and work-based learning
🔹 support faster upskilling and reskilling
🔹 improve cross-border recognition and mobility of competences
🔹 build a common language for blue skills through SA BlueComp
🔹 connect companies, academia, research and public institutions through the Adriatic Blue Growth Cluster
🔹 translate skills policy into practice through the Blue Economy Training Centre

I particularly appreciated that this was not only a panel for the audience, but also a discussion with the audience.

Using Mentimeter, participants contributed their views on the biggest barriers to skills availability, priority future competences, the importance of cross-border cooperation and the actions that could make the greatest difference over the next three years.

One conclusion stayed with me:
👉 Skills gaps are not simply an education problem. They are a system challenge.

The South Adriatic does not need three education and labour-market systems trying separately to solve the same problems. We need stronger connections between them — and between people, institutions and sectors.
A competitive South Adriatic blue economy requires not only the right skills, but a system capable of identifying, developing, recognising and continuously updating those skills across borders.

Many thanks to Michael Chatziefstathiou, Antonio Agrosi, Danilo Nikolić, Miško Rađenović, Valeria Patruno, Leida Matja and Mirko Đurović for their contributions, and to everyone in the audience who actively joined the discussion.

This is exactly the kind of dialogue needed if we want to move from blue skills to blue growth.

#SASKILLS #AdriBioPro2026 #BlueEconomy #BlueSkills #SouthAdriatic #Interreg #EUSAIR #Education #SkillsDevelopment #CrossBorderCooperation #BlueGrowth #Kotor #Montenegro