Youth employment: “Today I graduate: what do I do tomorrow?”

THEyou start sending your CV once, twice, three times and no one replies. Or worse, a standard email replies that they “will let you know”, and you already know they will never let you know. Go to some Career Days, where by pushing others you can leave your resume in the anonymous letterbox of some company. Then you go home – that of your parents, because before having your own, you need one, despite the new soft loans for young people – and you wait. What, you don’t know.

Italy is in the penultimate place among European countries for the percentage of graduates between 25 and 34 years: 29 per cent (more than half are girls), just above Romania, and far from the target of 45 set by Brussels for 2030. Few but good ones, one might think, will have the road smoothed. Instead the gear is jammed. Among the 354 thousand workers sought by companies in December (from the Bulletin of the Excelsior information system created by Unioncamere and Anpal), 133 thousand are unavailable: not all graduates, certainly, but in the list of the most requested there are specialists in mathematical, physical and chemical sciences. , engineers, computer scientists. Something is not working and it is not just the mismatch, that is, the gap between the supply and demand for work. This is precisely where supply and demand are not found, one does not know when and where to cross the other. The result is, among young people, a great sense of emptiness and frustration. And a question, which they cannot answer: after graduation, what do I do?

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The “placement offices” limp

“The problem is that young people waste precious years sending out resumes instead of acquiring the skills they don’t have»Says Michel Martone, professor of law and economics of productive activities at the La Sapienza University of Rome. What is missing? “Guidance services and employment centers, where to leave your data that someone should then fish. In Italy it was always thought that they should be public, so the private ones never took off. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter who runs them but that they work. Especially now, with the recovery underway. Instead, now that there is more demand, the knots come to a head ».

But the employment centers are not an office like any other, take some computers, hire a couple of navigators and go: “It takes years to build an efficient network that connects training and the productive realities of the territory. Germany teaches us this ». In fact, before you go to the employment office (assuming you find one working), a student applies to his university’s Placement service. Often, even this limping: «Universities should have much more resources and much more technical and administrative personnel. For small universities it is easier; the big ones lack the means »continues Martone.

Among the small ones there is theAmerican John Cabot University, in Rome: «I have relationships with 700 companies: I manage to convey 1000 job positions for 1500 students. But, I realize, ours is a niche »explains Antonella Salvatore, director of the Center for Higher Education and Career Initiation. “During the Career Days I cross paths who have available positions with the data of the young people and allow graduates to have real job interviews, one to one, lasting 40 minutes”.

The real problem, what the Italian education system cannot or does not want to overcome, is there clear separation between the world of school and university and that of work. Divisive and complex theme: “Suffice it to recall how much the alternation between school and work has been opposedAdds Professor Salvatore. What today – halved in time – is called PCTO, and the acronym already makes the content difficult.

The university should be a campus

The reality is that, if we exclude the ITS (the higher technical institutes that allow 80 per cent of young people to find a place one year after graduation), for those who follow the traditional course of study, the world of work remains something unknown. «In Italy the education system has never changed. But the traditional sequence: first the study, then the work, no longer makes sense»Continues Antonella Salvatore, who has dedicated a book to the topic, Stressed out or lying down? Just looking for work. Advice for bewildered young people (FrancoAngeli). “Those jobs that teenagers do abroad at 14, our children do – perhaps – at 20. Instead they are very useful, because they train autonomy.”

When you enter university, the question does not change and the distance from real life ends up being penalizing: “Our children miss out on those social experiences that help develop soft skills, today more and more requests »adds Michel Martone. “For example, if you want to publish a university magazine, you have no money and you have to convince your classmates to participate, you develop organizational and relational skills that will certainly be useful one day. In general, if the university were lived as a campus, with many extra activities, it would certainly be more formative. Skills are one thing, soft skills another. Today we are in a transition phase, and in the job market there is a lot of qualities such as empathy and the ability to work in a team ».

Antonella Salvatore adds: «Companies are not so much interested in the knowledge you already have, but how you go about getting what you don’t have, how you move. It matters a lot to be able to manage a conflict, to know how to understand others. Girls need greater self-confidence, which they don’t always have. “

You need to know how to orient yourself in the digital world

The gap between a fluid reality and a granite formation system is increasingly evident, and it is the children who are the first to suffer. By now they know that graduating in the right time (never dilate them too much!) And with good grades is a necessary but not sufficient condition, and they also know that the university cannot give that much. But what to do to close the dangerous mismatch and present the most attractive resume possible? Being discouraged is a waste of time. More constructive is to think about it first, “trying as much as possible to enrich the curriculum with transversal skills, which today are increasingly valued and in demand »suggests Martone. The two stripes in the cross, elongated with ingenious typographic solutions, make you turn up your nose. We need to add content, first of all an excellent knowledge of English. And then?

Anna Lo Iacono, Senior Manager Sustainability of Fastweb, a company that hired 120 people in 2020 and another hundred in 2021, explains that the most requested skills are digital, “especially in the field of cyber security, where today they immediately take on, in Big data, in the Cloud. This does not mean that we are only looking for young people with scientific or economic degrees, but who at least know how to orient themselves in the digital world, know how to recognize a hacker attack, distinguish fake news… “.

For those with a humanities degree, the doors are not barred. “The important thing is that you want to continue to train”. Translated: even with the piece of paper in hand, you have to continue to broaden your horizons, update yourself, fill in the gaps in the sectors where you feel more open (99 and praise, our campus of orientation and training on the most requested digital professions, can prove very useful in this sense). In short, don’t stop.

Companies like proactive young people

As for soft skills, Fastweb appreciates “recent graduates who are involved in voluntary work, civil service or associations, who have attended courses abroad, done “jobs”: all experiences that help to compose the portrait of a young person who gets busy, gets involved, wants to build the future, shows availability and enthusiasm. Companies like a proactive person. And to young people I say: please send your curriculum by mail. We – and not just us – look at them “.>

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