Training workers from abroad: Sicindustria takes the field

Providing skilled labour to companies on the training of individuals from abroad. This is the project launched by Sicindustria, of which Luigi Rizzolo is president, as part of a national strategy of the same Confindustria on the basis of data collected by the technical structures and the needs of companies that are often in difficulty due to the lack of specialised personnel that are difficult to find on the market.

The project launched by the Sicilian industrialists' association (seven out of nine provinces belong to it) in collaboration with other entities and, in particular, the Osmosi employment agency, with the aim of training 25 electricians from Argentina, is beginning to provide an initial response to this type of problem. A project that has been given the go-ahead by the Ministry of Labour and one of the first initiatives that Sicindustria is putting in place to provide concrete answers to companies: there is a growing demand for specialised workers, secretaries, pharmacists, diabetologists, anaesthetists, labour doctors, insurance brokers and cabinetmakers, electrical and IT engineers. "Italy is facing a growing labour crisis that is highlighting an unforeseen challenge: the lack of qualified personnel in the specific field of electricians," explain the experts at Osmosis. "The lack of qualified candidates is one of the main causes of the recruitment difficulties declared by companies, accounting for 31.7% of cases. 12% of the difficulties are attributed to inadequate preparation'.

A point that has been grasped by the leaders of the industrialists, who have opened a real work site on this issue involving all regions. Sicindustria is collaborating on the vocational training project to ensure an effective match between labour supply and demand and for job placement. The electricians' training project has also been built thanks to a transnational network of which Fasten is a member, which collaborates with the aim of providing foreign nationals with the right working and safety skills, becoming familiar with the Italian regulatory framework, the specifications required for the execution of activities and the differences in the electrical systems used in Italy; Metro, which collaborates in the vocational training project with regard to the instrumental resources and venues that will be used to hold the training course; Tamse, which is in charge of sponsoring and disseminating the vocational and civic-linguistic training project through its employees and the entire community in the Cordoba area; the Dante Alighieri Association in Cordoba, which collaborates in the vocational training project with regard to the A1 Italian language certification. 'Since my election,' comments Sicindustria President Luigi Rizzolo, 'I have decided to work on the theme of training and employment, aware of the fact that with a youth unemployment rate that in Sicily is in the double digits, companies continue to have difficulty finding specialised technicians and graduates in line with the needs of the 4.0 market. And the cost of the mismatch between entrepreneurial needs and adequate human resources, according to Unioncamere's estimates, in 2023 almost touched 44 billion in Italy, corresponding to a loss of added value equal to 3.4 per cent of what is generated overall by the industrial and service sectors under observation. Clearly, this is an emergency. And we do not intend to stand by and watch'.

The first step was to breathe new life into the service offered by Unimpiego and the results were not long in coming: from May to August, in fact, more than 500 people from Sicily alone registered on the ww.unimpiego.it platform in the two offices in Palermo and Messina, aged between 20 and 40 and with a wide range of backgrounds, from specialised workers to recent graduates or diploma holders looking for a job or an apprenticeship (more than 20 have already been activated). "It is necessary to work on matching job supply and demand," says the Sicindustria president, "and we, through the Unimpiego channel, propose ourselves precisely as a link between companies and job seekers. I must also emphasise that Palermo is proving to be an interesting location for many companies, both for the quality of the human capital available and for the city's strategic position. What is needed now is to find a way to keep talent here and, at the same time, in a labour market that is often fragmented and characterised by a mismatch between required and available skills, to ensure that the two hemispheres meet and complement each other'.