Anyone making the transition from academic studies to employment faces a significant challenge. Today, the historical period is particularly complex: the concept of “crisis” has lost its connotations of a single emergency and acquired those of a polycentric, permanent condition. Alongside Europe’s continuing loss of competitiveness on the global market, Italy has for many years been experiencing a significant fall in the birth rate, accompanied in some parts of the country by actual population loss. From 2008 to 2023 Italy’s birth rate declined by 200,000 per year. The country has the most marked generational imbalance in Europe, with the lowest number of under-35s as a percentage of the total population.
In light of these factors, which together have led to a critical contraction in the labor force, society needs, on the one hand, better-performing workers to maintain current production capacity. And, on the other, new generations with a greater awareness of employment opportunities. On this point – thanks not least to the development and deployment of new cutting-edge technologies – the world of work is undergoing radical changes, with new employment models (remote working first and foremost) and a greater focus on work-life balance.
The factors playing the biggest role in transforming the world of work and, as a consequence, re-thinking training pathways, include technical innovations, notably the roll-out of artificial intelligence (AI). Although the European Union is lagging behind the United States and China in this respect, in Italy the growing integration of AI in production processes is one of the greatest sources of opportunities – and at the same time of anxieties – for people embarking on education and training.
AI and rapid technological development mean that knowledge, understood as the learning and storing of concepts, is becoming less useful. On the one hand, the rapid pace of these developments requires constant adaptation and, on the other, AI itself can now perform many operational tasks. In this framework, humanities subjects and, notably, soft skills – which can increase job applicants’ appeal in the labor market and their success once in work – are acquiring a new importance that supersedes the traditional classifications and contrapositions between science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects and the humanities.
At the same time, observers have noted the need to develop young people’s critical capacity so that they can supervise and use technological tools and identify which purposes automation is best suited for. AI’s algorithms only provide the most probable solution and are not always an effective instrument to find the best solution. Against this background, the importance of developing a mindset inspired by humanism and the quest for meaning and truth has increased.
While the new technologies have provided tools to make training and work more efficient, innovative and forward-looking, many workplaces have not yet developed sufficient expertise to grasp these new opportunities in full. In the public sector, for example, many processes and procedures could easily be replaced using AI mechanisms, but the sector still lacks personnel with the necessary, specific skills. This lack of advanced digital expertise is closely related to the sort of background that is shared by a majority of public sector employees. It cannot be easily reconciled with the current needs of the business world and the private sector more generally, which is forced to interact with a bureaucracy that is slow and where innovation seems a distant goal.
Another factor to consider is that in Italy the world of work is still burdened with a number of serious, longstanding problems. First, a persistent lack of gender parity: equality remains elusive, notwithstanding progress made in recent decades. For example, Italy is one of the lowest-ranked OECD countries for number of women active in the labor market. Second, the low degree of cooperation between the academic and business worlds: along with the chronic under-funding of Italian universities, this makes it difficult to achieve an adequate level of public and private investment in the research and development sector. One contribution here could be the “PhD Executive” or “industry doctorate”. Indeed, Aspen Institute Italia has launched a proposal in this regard. Such a degree (which foresees both academic study and work experience/research within a company) is essential to drive and strengthen a technological transfer that can give post-grad students a central role. Such an effort should be underpinned by an ongoing dialogue between the universities and businesses.
In this context, more and more young graduates, whose often outstanding university careers cost the Italian State hundreds of thousands of euros, are moving abroad. Although these people express a desire to return and contribute to their country’s prosperity, the problems in the Italian system and the difficulty of finding opportunities that meet their expectations often make it difficult to turn that desire into reality. So identifying new solutions agreed by universities, institutions and the business world is and remains of the utmost importance. The goal is to recreate a fertile terrain for the development, growth and work of the new generations.