The Italian port sector is undergoing a classic phase of substitution between capital and labor. This can be seen in the gap between two magnitudes which, over the long term, have taken opposite directions: between 1980 and 2020, direct employment fell by 28%, while freight traffic volumes grew by 21%. Translated into economic terms, this means more output handled with less labor input — a productivity gain driven by automation, which however shifts the center of gravity of demand from the number of workers to the quality of skills. This is the summary of the report entitled “The future of the Italian port sector. The skills of the sea” presented by Randstad Research in Genoa aboard the sailing ship Clipper Stad Amsterdam with the participation of the CEO for Italy Marco Ceresa. On board, besides him, were also Andrea Castellett (head of institutional relations for Randstad Italia) and Antonio Lampugnani (Randstad Intempo).
According to the research, there are four drivers defining the trajectory of the sector: the digitalization of warehouse processes, logistics integration, sustainability, and naval gigantism. According to Emilio Colombo, coordinator of the Scientific Committee of Randstad Research Italia, ships of increasing size impose capex in dedicated infrastructure and technologies and introduce unpredictable demand peaks, complicating workforce planning and the management of fixed quayside costs.
The analysis then highlighted how, on the human capital front, composition matters in addition to quantity. Female presence remains confined to 6.3% in operational roles. The picture improves in the Port System Authorities, where women reach 46%, but vertical segregation remains marked: only 31% access managerial positions.
Regarding new professions, according to Randstad, the transition generates demand for higher value-added profiles: automation and digitalization operators, safety experts, logistics and reshoring professionals, versatile technicians, sustainability and circular economy specialists, trainers, advanced maintenance workers, and drone operators. The case of the yard planner, for example, summarizes this evolution: from empirical yard management to the governance of fully automated processes, where the objective is to maximize crane utilization and eliminate downtime. Thus, a wage premium for digital skills, integrated management software, predictive simulation, and real-time optimization is added to operational experience.
The report groups the new demand into six clusters, useful for guiding spending on training. The first, energy and environmental sustainability, intercepts Pnrr investments in renewables and emission monitoring (energy auditor, green transition manager, electrification technician). The second, innovation and automation, revolves around AI, cybersecurity, IoT, and remote control. The third, design of zero-emission infrastructure and vehicles, enables the decarbonization of physical capital. The fourth cluster, logistics and transport, has the most direct link with supply chain efficiency: demand planners, fleet managers, and traffic engineers optimize coordination between maritime, land, and rail modes. The fifth, training and industrial transition, concerns the reskilling and upskilling of the existing workforce, a condition for not dispersing human capital during reconversion.
The sixth, environmental monitoring and assessment, oversees regulatory compliance and growing regulatory risk, with environmental engineers and sustainability managers.
The research also dedicated a focus to the inland waters market and the lake economy. Three hubs were considered (Lakes Garda, Como, and Maggiore) with 99 vessels moving 11.7 million passengers and 45 tonnes of goods. Here too, specialized professions emerge: the green & hybrid propulsion engineer for the fleet transition, the integrated multimodal logistics manager for optimizing connections, and the digital smart-ticketing analyst for “Mobility as a Service” platforms.
In conclusion, the picture that emerged is of a sector where productivity growth is now decoupled from employment: value is no longer created by increasing staff, but by raising their skills. The critical variable for the return on investment — public and private — will not be infrastructural capacity, but the availability of human capital capable of making it yield.
The round table that followed the presentation of the research saw the participation of some of the most important HR managers of Italian maritime-port companies. Among them Luca Trevisan (Contship), according to whom “the trend from the 1980s to today, automation has expelled a significant number of people from the docks” and, in the future perspective, “port labor will be increasingly residual.” The suggestion was to “find alternatives: people can do many different things. Training will serve to retrain older resources towards new technologies and young people towards manual jobs.”
Eugenio Massolo, president of the Fondazione Accademia Italiana della Marina Mercantile, underlined the importance for ITSs “to be able to modify the planning of training courses every year,” adding that “factors such as welfare and companies with a strong identity, in addition to opportunities for experiences abroad, represent an important attraction for young people, even greater than that of large multinational companies.”
Mario Sommasiva (Spinelli) commented on the research, highlighting how “the transformations underway in the market are not those of terminal operators but of shipowners, of the large shipping lines that today manage a market that is almost more than oligopolistic. Today the pivot of the system is the shipowners and therefore the transformation fundamentally concerns them. There is an objective problem – he added – of market restriction which refers back to regulatory issues. There is a European regulation (Block Exemption Regulation) that has favored a process of growth and acquisitions by the largest maritime carriers, but these are processes very far from the territories in which they are inserted.”
Alessandro Ferarri (Assiterminal), recalling that in ports (unlike what happens in the logistics world in warehouses) the average RAL of a worker is well over 30,000 /year, invited to exploit existing opportunities to obtain incentives for training from the Port System Authorities (Port bonus and public resources for the reskilling of port workers).
Rodolfo Magosso (Ignazio Messina & C.) finally emphasized the importance of being able to distinguish between professional figures: “You cannot treat the seafarer the same way as the administrative employee.
Al personale di bordo ancora di più dobbiamo trasmettere l’identità aziendale, farli sentire importanti e partecipi di un gruppo anche se poche volte frequentano la sede. A bordo delle navi nella sezione di macchina noi abbiamo da sempre russi e ucraini che lavorano insieme e non è mai successo nulla”. Sia il direttore delle risorse umane della Ignazio messina che Ferrari di Assiterminal hanno posto l’accento anche sugli “aspetti di fascino e di sfida che difficilmente si riescono a trovare in altri settori diversi dallo shipping”.
N.C.
ISCRIVITI ALLANEWSLETTER QUOTIDIANA GRATUITA DI SHIPPING ITALY
