Key points
- In total, 600 professional drivers from Egypt and Morocco will take part in training.
- Two hundred participants will receive support to take up work in the European Union.
- One hundred Egyptian drivers will be prepared for jobs in Romania, while 100 Moroccan drivers will be prepared for employment in Italy.
- The programme covers recruitment, technical and language training, employer matching, legal mobility and integration support.
- The project will run from June 2026 to December 2028.
- Thirty additional trainers will also receive training.
From identifying barriers to testing a workable model
An IRU study commissioned by the European Commission illustrates the scale of the challenge: the EU road transport sector is short of around 500,000 professional drivers. The average driver is 47 years old, while people under 25 account for just 5 percent of the workforce.
Around 300,000 drivers from outside the EU were working in the bloc in 2023. They represented 7.5 percent of all professional drivers and approximately 8 percent of those employed in freight transport.
The use of non-EU drivers varies considerably between member states. By the end of 2022, just five countries accounted for as much as 90 percent of all driver attestations issued in the EU.
Poland was by far the largest employer. At the end of 2023, Polish companies employed 162,489 drivers from third countries, including more than 88,000 Ukrainian citizens. In international transport, they made up almost 30 percent of the workforce.
The figures were much lower elsewhere. In Spain, employment contracts with non-EU drivers represented 6 percent of the total in 2021, or 19,787 people. Denmark recorded only 15 driver attestations for third-country nationals between January and October 2024.
Administrative and immigration procedures remain among the biggest obstacles, often taking between six and 12 months. Differences in licence-exchange rules and the requirements for obtaining EU professional qualifications create further complications.
Two recruitment corridors
SDM4EU II is designed to turn the EU’s Talent Partnerships policy into a practical recruitment system. It establishes two specific routes: 100 drivers selected in Egypt will be prepared for employment in Romania, while 100 candidates from Morocco will be trained for jobs in Italy.
The training component is broader than the employment pathways. Six hundred professional drivers will take part, meaning that only one-third of participants will receive direct support to enter the EU labour market. UNTRR will support the integration process in Romania, while FAI will perform that role in Italy.
GOPA PACE is coordinating the project. It was commissioned by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development through the Migration Partnership Facility and is co-funded by the European Union. AASTMT, Soleterre and ICAR Foundation are also involved, while IRU acts as the technical partner responsible for training standards.
Training first, employment afterwards
A central principle of the pilot is to prepare drivers before they travel to their destination country. The project combines candidate recruitment and selection, technical and language training, employer matching, legal mobility, integration assistance, employment and measures designed to improve staff retention.
That approach differs from the traditional model, in which a company finds a driver abroad and then manages the qualification, work-permit and employment-authorisation procedures on its own. Support is intended to continue after the drivers arrive in Italy and Romania.
The project will also upgrade the skills of 30 local trainers, expanding the capacity to train drivers in Egypt and Morocco.
Italy and Romania will provide the first test
The project will run from June 2026 to December 2028. Patrick Philipp, IRU’s director for certification and standards, says the programme is intended to help Italy and Romania address driver shortages while improving the qualifications and employment prospects of professional drivers in Egypt and Morocco.
The pilot begins as migration returns to the centre of political debate in parts of the EU. Italy, one of the programme’s destination countries, recently introduced temporary checks on its maritime and air borders with Spain in response to the situation in Ceuta.
Member states are developing their own solutions
SDM4EU II forms part of wider efforts by member states to make it easier for non-EU drivers to access their labour markets. In eight EU countries, driving has been added to the list of shortage occupations, which can shorten procedures and remove the need for a labour market test. Spain and Portugal are taking a different approach, relying on bilateral agreements with selected third countries.
Germany is also preparing changes. Proposed measures would allow qualification exams to be taken in eight languages, including Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian and Turkish. The plans also include cutting 30 minutes from the driving component of basic qualification training, removing the section on critical situations and allowing candidates to retake tests multiple times.
Germany is also considering easier recognition of driving licences from selected countries, including Ukraine and Montenegro.
A small pilot against a major shortage
Against a shortage estimated at around 500,000 vacancies, a project involving 600 participants — only 200 of whom are expected to enter an EU employment pathway — is modest in scale.
IRU stresses that recruiting drivers from third countries should complement, rather than replace, efforts to attract more women and younger people to the profession.
The pilot’s main purpose is to determine whether combining training, legal mobility, employer matching and integration support can produce a model that could be used more widely.
