Maturità 2025, how to enhance school-to-work paths during the oral interview

In vocational colleges, the focus is directly on job placement with intensive practical experience. For hotel management institutes, training periods in restaurants and hotels. Industrial and craft institutes organise internships in machine shops, plant engineering companies or fashion workshops, where students participate directly in production processes. For the social and health courses, experience is provided in crèches, old people's homes and day centres, with care and animation activities. Agricultural institutes provide 'on-the-job' experiences at farms, nurseries and food processing companies, where students participate in seasonal production activities.

In short, now that these 'on-the-job' experiences are again central to schooling, let us see how they are to be attested and evaluated. For internal candidates, the assessment of the CTPs takes place through a well-defined process involving various parties, class councils, external and internal tutors. In the final assessment, these experiences are evaluated considering both the transversal and the technical-professional competences acquired by the students during the courses. The assessment process is mainly based on the observation of the external tutor, who monitors the student in the work context and fills in special evaluation forms relating to the commitment, relational and organisational skills and professional competences displayed.

The skills acquired are certified with certificates that flow into the student's curriculum and school credit, influencing the final grade in the State examination. The class council, in addition to including the Pcto activities carried out in the curriculum, also attaches all the certificates and assessments obtained at the end of the school-work courses carried out in the three-year period to the Document of 15 May.

For internal candidates who, following an aptitude examination, have, on the other hand, been admitted to the penultimate or final year of the course, the Pcto carried out previously must be documented with the individual training pact and the certificate of competence from the previous school with the number of hours carried out. A declaration from the employer or the head of the host establishment is required for 'activities similar to the Pcto'.

For external candidates, who have not completed the Pcto pathways, "Pcto-like activities" will be counted, i.e. all those work experiences in the form of employment or self-employment and learning activities carried out in a formal or non-formal work context, with the aim of acquiring transversal or technical-professional skills under the responsibility and guidance of a tutor, an employer or a manager of the host structure, also in the form of voluntary work, company internships, apprenticeships and traineeships. In order for the candidate's pathway to be valid, the above-mentioned activities, taken together, must correspond to at least three quarters of the total number of hours envisaged by the study pathway for which the external candidate intends to sit the State examination.

The return of the former alternanza scuola-lavoro (we still prefer to call it that - while waiting for the Minister for Education and Merit, Giuseppe Valditara, to give it a better name) as an admission requirement for the State examination does not outweigh the provision that school-to-work pathways will also find a place in the oral interview. For internal candidates, during the interview, there will be a phase in which the candidate's ability to critically analyse and relate to the course of study followed will be assessed, by means of a brief report or multimedia work, the experiences carried out within the framework of the Pcto (or similar activities) and first-level apprenticeships, with reference to the overall course of study followed.

For external candidates who did not follow the Pcto pathways, the interview will, on the other hand, enhance the cultural heritage of the person starting from the professional and individual history, as it emerges from the individual training pact, and encourage a biographical rereading of the pathway also in the perspective of lifelong learning.

A word of advice to you high school seniors: bring up your (highly formative) school-work experiences (or assimilated activities) during the oral interview, do not limit yourself to summary and hasty answers. Rather, share all those activities that have positively marked you and, above all, aroused your interest and awareness for your personal and professional future.