Competence Shortage
in Italy according to OECD

According to the estimates of the last OECD report "Getting Skills Right: Italy", realized to identify the indicators measuring skills shortage and surplus basing on five items (wage increase, employment increase, increased worked hours, unemployment rate, under-qualification exploitation) data, our Country is passing through a phase of low-skills equilibrium, in which skills supply and demand tend to flatten downwards in a vicious circle which has profound (and negative) effects on productivity, growth and on implementation of new technologies. It is, moreover, a situation in which the low supply of skills is completed by a weak demand by companies.

However, in the Italian labor market there are categories of professionals, specifically IT-skilled, experts in digital technologies, skilled profiles in medical and engineering areas, who seem to be in a certain sense "rewarded" (both in terms of employment and wages) with performance well above the medium average. Unfortunately, the demand for high skills remains still too weak and limited to the demands of the big companies (Italians or multinationals). For the rest, we need to focus on a supply chain made up of 85% of SMEs, working on more “traditional” industries and activities, with low productivity, and which consequently present a demand for high-level skills well more restrained.

This is one of the most obvious clues of the Italian mismatch skills dynamic. A misalignment of the worker's skills with those required by the market or organization to perform a specific job. The OECD estimates that at least 6 out of 100 workers possess significantly lower competencies than those who tend to be required by the tasks they carry out every day. On the other side, there are workers with skills in excess (11.7%) and over-qualified ones (18%), who instead represent, in addition to an important source of potential (unfortunately, unexpressed), also a substantial part of the workforce of our Country. With one last insight, not a small one: according to the community report, 35% of the workers appears to be operating in a job that does not have directly (or has not at all) to do with their profiles (and studies).