Data Card - Cohesion policy and skills development
The European Year of Skills, promoted by the European Commission and running until May 2024, aims to strengthen the capacity of citizens of the Member States to participate in the labour market and to provide new impetus to the achievement of the EU's social objectives for 2030, which calls for the involvement of at least 60% of adults in training activities and employment for at least 78% of the adult population.
The initiative also aims to contribute to achieving the objectives of the Digital Decade policy Programme 2030, in training at least 80% of adults with basic digital skills and employing 20 million IT experts. Currently, more than three quarters of EU businesses report having difficulty finding workers with the necessary skills, while only 37% of adults regularly undertake training.
We therefore talk about digital skills but also about upskilling and reskilling, when we are faced with the need to offer new opportunities, by the means of training courses capable of bringing professionalism that may have developed in the past into the present. "The development and recognition of these skills plays an important role in promoting sustainable economic growth, social inclusion and competitiveness. The EU supports employers, workers and training institutions in promoting these skills" explains the dedicated portal of the European Commission.
The EU provides significant funding and extensive technical assistance for skills development and retraining. The EU's main instrument for investing in people is the European Social Fund in the framework of cohesion policy. In the 2014-2020 programming period, part of the ESF resources financed the National Operational Programme Youth Employment Initiative (NOP IOG), to mitigate youth unemployment. The Programme is part of the European strategy which also gave rise to the Youth Guarantee and has a key role in jointly addressing the problem of unemployment and inactivity of young people in our country. The NOP IOG (over 230 thousand projects monitored on OpenCoesione as of 31 December 2023, for a public cost of 2 billion euros) represents the main tool for implementing the Youth Guarantee in Italy. Implementation is almost entirely delegated to the Regions, intermediate bodies of the NOP, which plan and implement the projects in their territories. One of the focuses of the NOP IOG is training, aimed at increasing the participation of young NEETs in training activities and Youth Guarantee measures. As regards this last intervention, the NEETs (people who at a given moment do not study, work or receive training) registered in the program as of 31 August 2023 are 1,746,523. Out of these, 84.7% were taken care of by employment services. In 79.4% of cases these are young people with high difficulties in entering the job market. 65.2% of the young people taken care of were initiated into an active policy intervention: the measures provided are 1,119,242, mainly extracurricular internships (56.7%), followed by employment incentives (18.6%) and training (17.1%). The employment placement rate of the 831,151 young people who completed the intervention was 67.3%, for a total of over 559 thousand employed at the end of April. With respect to the type of contract, 78.8% are stable employment relationships with 65.9% permanent employment relationships and 12.9% apprenticeship contracts.
For adults, however, starting from 2022, the Gol program - Guarantee of employability of workers - has launched a redevelopment of active employment policy services that leverages the issue of skills. The reform action is financed by Italy's national recovery and resilience plan (PNRR Mission 5, Component 1)
Speaking of skills, the European Year of Skills also aims to increase transversal skills, which are critical thinking, teamwork and learning skills, essential elements for work, education and daily life.
In Italy we have an example of this with the “At the School of OpenCohesion (ASOC)”, which for more than ten years is leading lower and upper secondary school students to interrogate about cohesion policies by activating civic monitoring paths on projects financed by European or national resources, which enables them to develop skills capable of integrating and strengthening those of the curriculum. Schools can in fact choose to use the themes of the ASOC educational path in the teaching of Civic Education but also as the content of PCTO activities (Paths for Transversal Skills and Orientation - ex School-Work Alternation). In particular, the educational path contributes to deepening statistical skills, which fall within the STEM (from the English science, technology, engineering and mathematics, is the term used to indicate the scientific-technological disciplines and the related courses of study), but accustoms also students to group work and critical thinking, considered soft skills, fundamental relational skills in every area of community life and in employment placement.
"We must invest much more in training and skills development. We must do this by working side by side with companies. No one knows the professional profiles they need better than them. We must better reconcile these needs with the objectives and aspirations of those looking for a job. But we also want to attract to our continent the skills needed to help businesses and strengthen Europe's growth" said Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission.
In the 2021-2027 programming period, the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) has a budget of over 99 billion euros, over 14.8 of which are allocated for our country (data updated as of 31 December 2023). While waiting to see the implementation of the projects of this programming period, which combines the allocation of European resources with mandatory national co-financing, this Data Card celebrates the European Year of Skills through five interventions financed in the previous programming periods, 2014-2020 and 2007-2013.