After years of informal work as a farm laborer, Federico Olivieri, 29, could not believe it when a huge building site appeared next to his home in Sicily with training on offer for the numerous specialized jobs required.
The program by Italy’s largest construction group, Webuild, is among a growing number of “academies” run and financed by companies frustrated by many jobseekers lacking the know-how.
“We are being proactive about the problem. If the skills aren’t there, then we will create them ourselves,” Webuild HR, organization and systems chief officer Gianluca Grondona told Reuters of the group’s program, which it launched in November last year.
Skill mismatches are an international problem, but for Italy, with the lowest employment rate in the EU and productivity that has stagnated for more than two decades, it is acute.
Despite a large pool of people seeking work or outside the labor market, vacancy rates stood at 2.5 percent in the first quarter of the year, in line with the EU average, data from EU statistics agency Eurostat showed. This is compared with 2.8 percent in France and 0.9 percent in Spain in the same period.
Vocational schools and colleges are fewer and less popular in Italy than in most European countries, think tank Prometeia said in a report last month, and even those that are there fail to produce students with the right expertise.
At the same time, too many young people are still studying subjects with lower market demand, such as humanities, it said.
The problem has become more severe with the rapid development of new technologies, as Rome invests in EU-backed infrastructure projects as part of its post-COVID-19 recovery plan, worth about 200 billion euros (US$216 billion).
Big firms like Webuild, shipbuilder Fincantieri, and Italy’s state-owned railway group Ferrovie dello Stato (FS) are taking matters into their own hands.
On top of its apprenticeships, FS liaises with universities and schools to offer students more targeted courses.
“As the company changes, skills change and we need specific capabilities, particularly when it comes to digital and artificial intelligence-based jobs,” FS human resources chief officer Adriano Mureddu said.
Olivieri, who trained as an agronomist, was frustrated by a succession of temporary, underpaid contracts in a Sicilian agricultural sector undercut by cheap imports of citrus fruit.
He joined Webuild’s program this year and now works with tunnel boring machines at its site on Sicily’s eastern coast.
“The courses are an incredible opportunity for those who are willing to learn something new ... you can’t miss a chance like this,” Olivieri said.
Webuild aims to source from its work academies about 3,000 people out of 10,000 new hires it envisages over the next three years. The academies are close to its infrastructure work sites, mainly in southern regions where unemployment is high.
Lorenzo Esposito Corcione, a 19-year-old who studied at nautical school in Genoa, is one of 80 people hired by Fincantieri after being trained under its “Masters of the Sea” program launched eight months ago. The program drew 17,000 applicants.
“Without the course, I wouldn’t be here,” Esposito Corcione told Reuters at the end of his shift as an electrics fitter in the shipyard of the northeastern Port of Monfalcone. “There is a world of difference between what I studied in school and what is actually being done here in the yard.”
Italy faces a problem not only of skills, but also of numbers. It has one of the world’s oldest populations and lowest fertility rates, at 1.2 children per woman while the baby boomers of the 1960s are now retiring.
This means in the next five years Italy would need 3.1 to 3.6 million new workers, business group Unioncamere said.
Italy by 2050 would have almost 5 million fewer people, and more than one-third of them would be over 65 years old, national statistics office ISTAT said.
Younger blood is badly needed in a host of industries, from construction and tourism to agriculture.
Despite its anti-immigration rhetoric, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government last year quietly raised quotas for work visas for non-EU citizens to 452,000, which is to continue until next year, an increase of nearly 150 percent from the previous three years.
Italy has attracted workers from elsewhere in the EU, despite its wages being relatively low, but this has not helped resolve its skills mismatch.
For now, the academies and training offered by big firms are alleviating the problem, providing priceless opportunities to people like Pasquale Infante, 28, who has just starting work as a pipe fitter at Fincantieri’s Marghera plant near Venice.
“These program are good for workers and good for companies ... they are teaching people the skills they need,” Infante said.
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