The European Union’s transport policy clearly emphasizes that one of the most important tasks for the coming years is to develop a system of education and professional development for transport personnel that is adequate to international standards and simultaneously meets the expectations of economic practice. It is also about ensuring that the aforementioned system is a flexible framework that adapts to the changes occurring in the international transport market.
The scope of knowledge and skills of future transport sector employees is determined by such global trends as:
– globalization of the transport services market, which necessitates the introduction of international standards for the education and assessment of transport personnel. Employees in the transport sector will be required to have high mobility, creativity, and the ability to use information sources and apply them in specific professional situations
– commercialization of the transport services market, which makes managerial knowledge increasingly important in the education system
– implementation of new technologies (especially IT), both in the sphere of management and operations
– increase in environmental awareness.
The modern system of training personnel for the transport economy must take into account civilizational trends as well as meet the expectations of the transport services supply sphere. It is precisely the supply system of these services that creates the demand for specific types of personnel, for specific forms and levels of their education and development. To meet this, international projects are emerging, the main task of which is to develop a model of a future transport manager responsible for solving problems in the areas of: procurement, securing technological service processes, distribution, and finally, logistics management focused on cargo consolidation. One such project is the “Freight Integrator – Action Plan” implemented with the participation of research centers from: Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Italy. The idea of the project is to develop a system for transporting cargo using environmentally friendly modes of transport, thereby relieving major European roads from road transport. This is an important and complex problem, as it covers the entire sphere of organizing transport processes. Until now, there have been no transport managers who dealt so broadly with the issue of cargo consolidation, taking into account all modes of transport.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” No. 6/2005.