WORK: UNIONCAMERE-CONFINDUSTRIA AGREEMENT

FOR THE CERTIFICATION OF TECHNICAL-PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCES

Rome, 24 October 2023 – The difficult match between labour supply and demand, which in 2022 affected 40% of the hirings that companies had planned, could become even more acute in 2023, affecting 2.4 million job positions. To tackle this problem at its root, we need to starting from schools and young people, so that both know and understand better the needs of the business world. With this objective in mind, the President of Unioncamere, Andrea Prete, and the Vice President of Confindustria for Human Capital, Giovanni Brugnoli, signed an agreement today, aimed at the realisation and dissemination of quality school-to-work alternation experiences and the development of tools for the certification of skills acquired by students in secondary schools with a technical-professional orientation in transversal skills courses (PCTO).

"The agreement with Confindustria, which has already been formalised by the Unioncamere bodies, is part of an organic framework that has seen the stipulation of similar collaborations with other business associations," highlighted the president of Unioncamere, Andrea Prete. "It is crucial, in fact, to act on all fronts to promote quality training that meets the needs of businesses and offers young people faster and more satisfying employment opportunities. The recent reform, moreover, assigns precise functions to the Chambers of Commerce in terms of orientation to work and professions, and gives them an important role in the implementation of the certification system for skills acquired in non-formal and informal contexts and in the context of school-to-work alternation courses. A task that the Chambers perform in the territories, also as subjects of the National Network of Services for Active Labour Policies'.

"The Unioncamere-Confindustria agreement formalises a cooperation that has been ongoing for many years on the link between our education system and the needs of companies in an increasingly complex labour market," said Confindustria Vice President for Human Capital, Giovanni Brugnoli. "Together, Confindustria and Unioncamere will develop joint research and communication activities to bring the demand and supply of skills ever closer together, to reduce a mismatch that is on the verge of approaching the 50% rate and which, in fact, especially in some manufacturing sectors, sees half of the professional skills that companies need, particularly those of young people under 29, difficult to find. In concrete terms, we will work side by side, especially on the Excelsior system, involving more and more companies and sectors in the activity of disseminating and contextualising the vast Unioncamere database, which is fundamental for us, also in terms of guidance for our students. We will collaborate, then, for the dissemination of job training tools in our schools, in particular PCTOs, which, also through the forthcoming reform of technical-professional education, will become increasingly strategic and will have to be of higher quality."

Making use of the data from the Unioncamere and ANPAL Excelsior information system on the professional requirements demanded by businesses, the agreement sanctions cooperation between the parties for the promotion of training and professional orientation initiatives for young people, with particular attention to the needs of the production system related to the technical-professional training chain, ITS Academy courses and STEM disciplines, and the identification of models and tools useful for the certification of skills acquired by students in business contexts, through the implementation of school-to-work alternation courses promoted with specific quality standards.