Work and prejudice: Italian students do not want to do their parents' or technical-practical jobs

On which aspects should be improved, the survey leaves no doubt. Students are overwhelmingly in favour of orientation activities involving in-company experiences. 65% of them want them to be 'very useful' and another 26.7% consider them to be 'quite useful'.But when asked "Where did the orientation activities take place mostly?" the overwhelming answer is 'in my school' (63.1%), against a modest 10.9% of respondents who answered that they had benefited from orientation activities 'in companies or other workplaces'. The survey also shows that the majority of students are in favour of orientation activities in companies

And so it is also understandable why, among the figures encountered during orientation activities, only 6.4% are business professionals. At the top of the list are, on the other hand, teachers from their own school (37.5%), closely followed by students, researchers and university professors (34.1%). In this school that struggles to contaminate itself with the world of work, perhaps the first contact with the professions is just around the corner: it is everyday life in the family. In fact, 85.5% of the students interviewed claim to know 'very' and 'fairly' well the work of their parents or adults of reference. A small minority of 14.5% know little or nothing about it.

So it is mum and dad who inspire the choices of those preparing for the leap into the factory or university after graduation? Not really: only 13.6% actually say they want to follow in their parents' footsteps. All the others, for one reason or another, prefer to answer: 'No, thanks'. There are those who say that they are not suited to it (21.2%), those who find their parents' work socially unprofitable (10.4%), or poorly remunerated (9.2%), or inflexible and difficult to reconcile with their free time (together they make up 12%).

Read against the light, these very data could be among the causes of the mistrust that permeates this Generation Z selfie. Scrolling through the table of answers, in fact, it emerges that a large proportion of students declare themselves to be 'completely' or 'tendentially' distrustful. Distributed in almost equal quantities between the two adverbs, the young people who look with concern to the future are 43.3% of the entire sample.

What they do not seem to see in the lives of adults of reference is, after all, precisely what they are looking for in the 'ideal' job. To define it - this ideal job - the respondents had up to three options to choose from at the same time. It is striking that one in two dream of a profession that allows them to make use of their passions (56.9%), to earn a good salary (52.0%) and to find a good balance between work and private life (50.7%).

 If we think of the idealism and conviction of the young people 'made in 1968', we are faced with a fairly significant paradigm shift. A distance fuelled, in part, precisely by the descendants of those who lived through that period at the trenches: today's parents, who bring home the hardships of a world of work that in the last 20 years in Italia has given very little satisfaction, at least in terms of increased purchasing power and work-life balance.

Hope for a better future once again lies in university. It was 51% of respondents who said they would like to continue their studies in the "After Graduation" survey, carried out for the first year by ELIS and Skuola.net in 2022. And it is 67% in the new 2026 edition. An ambition that, numbers in hand, risks turning into a mirage. In fact, the latest Eurostat data released last November put Italia in second-last place among EU countries, above only Romania, for the number of young people with a tertiary degree: 31.6% against an average of 44%. It is not, therefore, the lack of enrolments that weighs heavily, but rather the drop-out rate, which is in the order of 10% already after the first year, according to the latest Anvur report.

In this context, it is safe to assume that the choice of university is at least partly influenced by a parallel prejudice about technical-practical professions. Almost half of high school students, not surprisingly, declare that they discard them a priori (48.9%), because they do not like them (41%), they are not suited to their skills (27%) and then, with response rates ranging between 3% and 7%, for a variety of other reasons: they are too tiring, not very remunerative, not very prestigious, they are practised by people from a different social background from their own, they are jobs that would not be approved by their parents.In fact, it is precisely on these technical-practical professions that many companies have been focusing their personnel searches for some time now, without finding them. A mismatch between the aspirations of young people and the needs of the market, which provides further proof of the need to strengthen the meeting between schools and companies in orientation activities.

This is precisely why the ELIS National Guidance Centre was set up, which today inaugurated new spaces in the historic site of Villa Fassini in Rome, which will become a hub where member schools will be able to develop guidance activities in close contact with major companies - including INPS - that have already joined.
Laboratories, open weeks and summer camps are among the activities aimed at the more than 600 middle and high schools that are part of the "Officine Futuro" network, which is also promoted throughout Italy by the Ministry of Education and Merit. The aim is to offer students what they say they want: orientation experiences in close contact with business professionals.