On 05 April the World Customs Organization (WCO) announced that with its reinforced commitment to digital transformation of Customs, the WCO had taken further steps to develop new electronic training tools. A new e-learning course on commodity classification and the Harmonized System (HS) has been made available on the CLiKC! platform. It has been developed under the European Union (EU)-WCO Programme for Harmonized System in Arica (HS-Africa Programme), with financial support of the European Union. The course has the title “HS Foundation” and is designed to be used as an introduction to all of the most essential concepts and elements of the HS.
The new course is designed to be studied within approximately 6 hours and consists of three modules. The first two modules introduce the HS as a whole, explain how to navigate it, and discuss product-specific aspects of classification with regard to main product categories while also addressing common challenges encountered by HS users. The third module deals with the standards of managing tariff classification work and related infrastructure in Customs administrations, including advance ruling systems.
The HS Foundation Course comes to complement and serve as an introduction to the existing comprehensive “HS Advanced” course, which zooms in on individual Sections, Chapters and headings of the Harmonized System, providing detailed information, examples of products, and plenty of exercises. That course has been recently migrated from Adobe Flash format to a new open-source platform. The migration of the course was also funded by the EU, within the framework of the HS-Africa Programme.
Both the HS Foundation Course and the HS Advanced Course are available for free to Member administrations via the WCO CLiKC! platform. An e-certificate will be issued upon successful completion of the course. Apart from the WCO official languages, the “HS Foundation” course will soon also be available in Portuguese, to address the needs of Portuguese-speaking countries in accessing basic training on the HS in a digital format.
The WCO CLiKC! platform is accessible at: