Zona Franca de Barcelona boost talent, innovation and future through dual professional training

• It is collaborating for the fourth consecutive year with the MetròpolisFPLab social project, which aims to highlight the value of dual professional training students, bringing them closer to the labour market, fostering the acquisition of key skills and supporting their lifelong employment and employability.

• This is an open innovation project, based on challenge-based learning, in which participating companies and institutions set real challenges to which vocational training students provide solutions, fully supported throughout the process.

• The CZFB will host scholarship students from the the Escola Pia Nostra Senyora, who were the finalists chosen to respond to the challenge of promoting the 4.0 District among young people in the Barcelona metropolitan area.

Barcelona, 5 June 2025.– The Consorci de la Zona Franca de Barcelona collaborates for the fourth consecutive year with MetròpolisFPLab, an innovation project promoted by the Agència Metropolitana de Desenvolupament Econòmic de l’Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona, the Ajuntament de Barcelona, the Diputació de Barcelona and the Fundació BCN Formació Professional, with the aim to highlight the value of dual professional training students, bring them closer to the labour market, foster the acquisition of key skills and support their lifelong employment and employability. The approach is that innovation in the field of vocational training is a form of learning and knowledge transfer with an impact on both people and local areas.

 MetròpolisFPLab is an open innovation project, based on challenge-based learning, in which participating companies and institutions set real challenges to which vocational training students provide solutions, fully supported throughout the process. This process helps to generate new educational methods that contribute to reducing early school leaving. In the case of the Consorci de la Zona Franca de Barcelona, the challenge set for this year’s edition was to come up with effective proposals to promote the District 4.0, its ecosystem of Industry 4.0 companies and the activity of its start-up incubators among young people in the Barcelona metropolitan area.

This edition of MetròpolisFPLab has involved 42 dual professional training centres from Barcelona, the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, Mataró, Rubí and Granollers, with a total of 410 teams and more than 1.700 students. The finalist teams for the challenge set by the CZFB were Gente de bien – from Centre López Vicuña – and TechUp – from Escola Pia Nostra Senyora. Today, the winning team was announced: the team of TechUp – from Escola Pia Nostra Senyora, who will receive a scholarship to start developing their project within the CZFB.

The State Special Delegate to the CZFB, Pere Navarro, explained that “attracting talent and responding to the new business profiles emerging because of digital transformation and the advance of the new economy is essential. Vocational Training is becoming an increasingly solid future option for young people, as it enables us to respond to the real needs and challenges faced by the productive sector.”

For her part, the General Director of the CZFB, Blanca Sorigué, commented that “we are very pleased with the collaboration we have maintained with MetròpolisFPLab, as the experience over these four years has been very enriching for everyone involved. The winning teams that have worked on real cases with us and the Barcelona Zona Franca Consortium have mutually benefited from a young perspective, a different way of doing and thinking from that of our own team, which has enabled us to spot opportunities and consider ways of doing things that otherwise would not have been possible.”

This year’s MetròpolisFPLab has also included challenges and collaboration from companies such as, in addition to the Consorci de la Zona Franca de Barcelona, Circuit de Catalunya, Aigües de Barcelona, Maresme Circular, Hospital de Granollers, Mesoestetic, Port de Barcelona, Powerdot, Seditesa, EcoHub, Ametller Origen and MB92.