Italy's Underperformance in Professional Training and How to Fix It
Despite the Jobs Act reforms in 2015 that introduced flexibility and active labor market policies, "Italy is still struggling more than other advanced economies to make the transition to towards a thriving and dynamic skills-based society," wrote the OECD in its Skills Strategy Diagnostic report for Italy in 2017.
Maurizio Del Conte, Full Professor at Bocconi Department of Legal Studies, looks at the role played by inadequate jobs training in the mismatch between demand and supply in Italy's labor market in his paper "The difficult cultural turning point in labor protection and the key role of vocational training," published in Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal. "I wanted to discover what the weak points of the Italian professional training system were, to understand what actions could be taken and how entities like government or unions could have an impact in restructuring the professional training system to solve these problems," Professor Del Conte explained.
Starting with the Lisbon Strategy in 2000, the EU has aimed to make labor markets more flexible. Yet flexicurity did not take root in Italy because investment was focused on keeping workers in jobs indefinitely rather than helping them move. Only in 2012 did Italy start to make the transition with the Monti-Fornero Act, followed by the Jobs Act three years later that introduced flexibility and also required the unemployed to take part in tailor-made courses leading to professional requalification and a return to work. Yet Italy is still far from realizing an efficient vocational training system because the Jobs Act was never fully carried out. The state has struggled to execute efficient active labor market policies amid overall indifference.
The public funding system for professional training needs to be reformed tying it to two things: the demand for skills, based on a detailed analysis of what companies are actually looking for; and a focus on the few most effective institutions, such as the Istituti Tecnici Superiori. Moreover, training programs should be nationally coordinated to achieve economies of scale instead of dissipating resources across 20 different regions. Lastly, assessment must be improved so that programs are monitored in terms of their impact on job training and employment.
"It surprised me that the situation was even worse than I thought, and that there is so little interest" he said. "Italy is one of the countries in the EU with the lowest productivity growth. And we can't grow in productivity unless we grow in skills."