The marine industry is a key component of the European economy and includes activities such as traditional shipping, offshore oil and gas, renewables and offshore construction. These activities are undertaken on sight by ships and offshore facilities, supported from shore by a complementary cluster which includes ships’ construction, repair, management, chartering, survey, classification, insurance, consultancy, valuation and finance. The marine education and training organisations and the recruitment companies are key stakeholders and part of the industry value chain, as they educate and supply workforce for the marine industry. The European labour is in direct competition with the labour supplied by the emerging Asian countries. While the latter seek to achieve competitive advantage through cost leadership, the European labour needs to respond with a differentiation approach. This proposal addresses this latter approach, which envisages supplying better quality personnel and targeting the full range of primary and support activities of the marine industry. Such approach needs to proactively consider the trends outlook of the rapidly changing industry, shaped by technological advancement and the supply and demand curves.In view of these challenges, the industry identified the improvement of workers’ skill base through skills programmes as a primary mean to achieve competitive advantage (IMarEST 2015). The skills base equally refers to the hard skills adapted to new technologies and activities, and to the soft skills that assist employees to demonstrate and complement their hard skills. Employers benefit from both above categories of skill sets by enriching their intangible resources through improved organisational competences. EU recognises this context and recommends education development through increasing quality of and access to vocational education and training and their adaptation to labour market needs.This project proposal aims to improve the employability skills and work opportunities for marine workers and to reduce the existing gap between the education and labour market, by diversification of career paths and skills recognition. Specifically, this project intends to build a collaborative network to continuously identify the gaps between marine labour market needs and educational field in terms of both hard and soft skills. This network will improve soft skills by continuous professional development of educational staff and marine workers in ICT to diversify career paths through collaborative short term training.The proposal will create teaching curricula focused on areas of hard skills shortage, targeting new marine qualifications in accordance with the National Qualification Frameworks, and define competence standards focused on learning outcomes, supported by development of open source resources. These will assist in establishing a unified system for transparency of skills and qualification by referring the work-related skills and learning outcomes to the European Qualification Framework, for recognition and validation.The 3 year project is led by Constanta Maritime University (CMU). Nikola Yonkov Vaptsarov Naval Academy, European Association of Career Guidance and STC-Group networked with CMU during previous European financed projects and joined this project. The partnership envisages involving more than 15 trainers and 6 administration personnel, as well as 100 participants from the marine industry.An online marine survey instrument will assist to map the stakeholders and subsequently to identify and develop new marine qualifications in areas of skill shortages, which requires trainers’ improved competence. Competence will be enhanced through short term training sessions. Partners will establish a common framework for skills assessment, and develop an E-platform for blended learning to facilitate target group’s access to training and certification. The platform will be tested during pilot courses.The methodology aims at increasing project efficiency and effectiveness, by establishing a framework for the coordination, reporting and evaluation. This framework includes circular management of time, budget, human resources and risk, and key performance indicators.The expected results include an online survey instrument, four newly developed marine qualifications supported by learning materials submitted to national agencies to be included into NQF, four soft skills supported by learning materials and an E-platform for Blended Learning.The project will have direct impact on the labour market/training organisations/VET trainees triangle. These will benefit from improved and transparent system for blended learning, new curricula design/assessment, better trainers and adequately trained and certified employees to EU standards.Longer term benefits include E-platform, continued online survey, curricula development for soft/hard skills training and organisational competence and networking.