STEM skills are strategic, but Italia is not keeping pace

Companies are looking for engineers, chemists, mathematicians and physicists. But their calls for candidates often go unanswered. This is the paradox created by the stark gap between the needs of a constantly evolving labour market and the skills offered by young people. Firstly, compared with the rest of Europe, the country suffers from a severe shortage of graduates. Added to this shortfall is a significant mismatch between the professional profiles sought by businesses and the most popular degree programmes. The gap is particularly pronounced in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and, whilst not unique to Italy, effectively acts as a brake on the productivity and competitiveness of the economy: the cost of this mismatch in 2023 was estimated by Unioncamere at just under 44 billion euros (2.5 per cent of GDP).

In Italia, the proportion of young university graduates is rising steadily – in 2025 it exceeded 31 per cent – but it remains the second lowest in the European Union, ahead of only Romania. The problems, however, do not relate solely to the small number of young people who continue their studies after leaving school, but also to the educational pathways themselves that young people choose. In fact, there is a significant shortage of professionals in highly specialised technological sectors in our country. A study by Unioncamere’s Excelsior information system shows that around half of the university graduates and graduates from Higher Technical Institutes (ITS) sought by businesses in 2025 were ‘nowhere to be found’. Last year, against a projected total of nearly 4.4 million new contracts, the gap between companies’ needs and the available supply proved alarming: overall, it was difficult to find almost half of the profiles sought (47 per cent), with peaks of 57.3 per cent for ITS Academy technicians and 50.9 per cent for graduates.

Indeed, some of the most sought-after skills on the labour market are actually among the hardest for businesses to find. The most popular degree remains economics, with 193,000 graduates in demand, followed by engineering (127,000). The other STEM disciplines also show strong employment prospects: in 2025, 36,000 graduates in mathematics, physics and computer science were sought after, along with 30,000 in the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors. Furthermore, according to data from Unioncamere, for young people under 30, the greatest job opportunities are concentrated in the scientific and technological sector: in fact, statistics tops the list, accounting for 51.1 per cent of recruitments. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely in this field that the greatest mismatch between supply and demand is found. Graduates in chemical and pharmaceutical subjects are the hardest to find, with an estimated recruitment difficulty of 72.4 per cent. Among the STEM disciplines, these are followed by statistics (66.3 per cent), industrial engineering (65.7 per cent) and electronic and information engineering (63.8 per cent).

The AlmaLaurea 2026 report, based on a survey of a sample of 700,000 first- and second-cycle graduates from 81 Italian universities, also highlights the effectiveness of STEM qualifications in enabling graduates to successfully enter the labour market. The study highlights, first and foremost, the importance of a key component of STEM education: digital skills. Among those who are familiar with at least five digital tools, the probability of finding employment within the first year of graduation is 18.6 per cent higher than for those familiar with no more than two tools. However, serious structural shortcomings persist in the digital sector. In this regard, according to Istat, only 45.9 per cent of Italian adults possessed adequate digital skills in 2023, lagging behind the EU average by almost 10 percentage points. Furthermore, in 2022, the proportion of graduates from ICT (information and communication technology) courses stood at just 1.5 per cent of all academic qualifications awarded, with a marginal female presence, at 0.3 per cent.

It is precisely the low level of female participation, evident in many science and technology degree programmes, that contributes to widening the gap between labour supply and demand. According to AlmaLaurea’s 2026 Gender Report, STEM courses are characterised by a genuine ‘gender segregation’ that has now become structural. The proportion of women in this field of study remains low. Among graduates in 2024, it stands at 41.1 per cent (compared with around 60 per cent of graduates overall) and has remained unchanged since 2015. Furthermore, women account for only 36.7 per cent of PhD graduates in the scientific and technological fields in 2024, whilst in other disciplinary areas they make up more than 50 per cent of the total.