'Building relationships of mutual trust is the basis for attracting workers'

This year's regional labour market survey provides, according to Francesco Buzzella, president of Confindustria Lombardia, 'a series of confirmations of the challenges that companies face in recent years when they turn to the labour market: unobtainable professional profiles, the need to identify formulas for attraction and retention, growth in turnover, and an increase in organisational and salary flexibility'.

Which sectors and territories are in greatest difficulty? And which figures cannot be found?

The Confindustria Lombardia survey reveals problems with more technical skills and tasks as well as with manual ones. On the other hand, as far as the areas are concerned, companies are having more problems identifying resources with skills that are functional to the digital transition, while in the internationalisation and green areas the difficulties diminish. The labour market for companies today is characterised by a shortage of human resources, and when companies lack the right skills and competences, the risk is that their competitiveness is compromised at the outset. Therefore, action must be taken immediately, both on the training and attractiveness front, if the challenge of competitiveness is not to be lost. Lombardy's companies are obviously active in responding to the emergence of a need for skills, for example through training activities for staff already in the company, or by resorting to external services, but also through involvement in educational programmes in the area, such as ITS and the school-to-work alternation system.

Is there any progress on the public-private partnership front in the education of the younger generation?

Together with the Region of Lombardy, we are supporting young people along the entire education chain up to their entry into the world of work. Over the past year we have been involved in a number of experimental projects that will see the light of day in the coming months: the pilot project to contain the phenomenon of university drop-outs by means of a counseling programme for re-orientation to studies, re-motivation and accompaniment to the definition of one's own professional project; the design of the Web App dedicated to the meeting between young people and businesses, which aims to promote orientation experiences through company visits co-organised with the ITS Academy foundations in the area; and participation in the strategic table for school buildings, which promotes public-private collaboration initiatives for the renovation of school buildings and the construction of the school model of the future.