The port industry frequently receives a bad press as there is a tendency to concentrate on financial crises and industrial relations problems, poor productivity and the like. This tends to obscure two facts: first that the industry has gone through more technological change in the past ten years than in the previous hundred — changes in cargo handling equipment and changes in shipping — accompanied by changes in demand and, above all, changes in the organisation and requirements for labour; secondly that, despite its image, there have been several notable innovations in the training and education area. The article that follows is, however, largely concerned with the broader areas of education rather than training.