Closing Italy’s skills gap is everyone’s business

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Italy is the birthplace of Leonardo, Galileo and Armani. For centuries, skilled Italians have been recognised for their contributions to the world’s art, science, and culture. A relatively small country, with scarce natural resources, Italy today is among the world’s leading industrialised economies and is home to millions of firms, including many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), who play a prominent role in many key global value chains. So the skills of Italy’s population matter. Not only for their own country, but also for their contribution to the future prosperity and well-being of the global community. 

Italy’s future prosperity depends upon the skills of its people

Today, Italy is facing a skills gap. OECD Surveys measuring the skills of 15 year-olds (PISA) and adults between the ages of 16 and 64 years old (Survey of Adult Skills, PIAAC) have detected a significant shortfall in skills  compared with other countries. Despite progress achieved over the past decade, young Italians’ PISA scores in literacy and science are still relatively low compared with the OECD average. Adults display an even larger skills gap compared to their peers in other OECD countries. In 2012, some 13 million adults between 25-64 scored at the bottom of the PIAAC ranking,  while in some southern regions 2 out of 3 adults were found to be functionally illiterate. Poor skills are paralleled by stagnant productivity growth, which indicates that Italy may be trapped in a low-skilled equilibrium in which both the supply of, and the demand for, skills are weak.

Implementing recent reforms requires concerted efforts  

Italy has recently embarked on a major reform effort aimed at boosting the development, activation and use of people’s skills. For example, the 2014 Jobs Act introduced a major overhaul of labour market settings to favour open-ended contracts (over fixed-term ones) and strengthen active labour market policies. The following year, the Good School Act made work-based learning compulsory for all high schools, in order to provide students with real life experiences and a much broader range of learning opportunities. But Italy did not stop there, and in 2015 put in place Industry 4.0, a 3-year programme that provides firms with targeted support to help them transition to digital technologies and boost their demand for skilled workers. 

Implementation of these reforms has met with many challenges. They can only be addressed by generating synergies among different skills policies, engaging more with key stakeholders and improving the multilevel governance of the national skills system. 

Italy faces 10 skills challenges

Today, the OECD Secretary General is in Rome to launch the OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report for Italy, together with a high-level panel of Ministers and undersecretaries. The report applies the framework of the OECD Skills Strategy to identify 10 skills challenges for Italy as it seeks to maximise its future skills potential. It includes a rich set of comparative data and evidence and offers concrete examples of how other countries are tackling similar skills challenges. 

With regards to developing relevant skills, the report focuses on:  

1. Equipping young people across the country with skills for further education and life; 

2. Increasing access to tertiary education while improving quality and relevance of skills;

3. Boosting the skills of low skilled adults.

When activating people’s skills, Italy will need to tackle the challenges of:  

4. Removing supply- and demand-side barriers to the activation of skills in the labour market;

5. Encouraging greater participation of women and youth in the labour market.

Italy also needs to make better use of the skills it has by: 

6. Making better use of skills in the workplace;

7. Leveraging skills to promote innovation.

Finally, Italy urgently needs to improve its overall skills system by: 

8. Strengthening multilevel governance and partnerships to improve skills outcomes;

9. Promoting skills assessment and anticipation to reduce skills mismatches;

10. Investing to improve skills outcomes.

Each of these 10 skills challenges are well known in Italy. By adopting a systemic approach to their analysis, this report underscores the need for renewed efforts to adopt a whole-of-government skills strategy that cuts across ministerial silos and gives an active role to key stakeholders, including civil society.  To close its skills gap, Italy needs to mobilise everyone’s energies to ensure that skills policies are implemented effectively and help deliver inclusive growth. 

Taking action today

The diagnostic phase of the OECD National Skills Strategy project in Italy has brought together many different ministries and a large number of stakeholders to gather insights and start generating a common narrative about the skills challenges facing Italy today. Developing concrete plans for action will mean building on the many reforms already underway and the continued engagement of all stakeholders.

The OECD stands ready to support Italy as it builds the skills that will empower its people to generate a new wave of well-being, prosperity and innovation that will benefit everyone, everywhere.

Links

OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report: Italy

OECD National Skills Strategy

Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)

For more on skills and skills policies around the world, visit: http://www.oecd.org/skills/

Follow the conversation on twitter: #OECDSkills

Join our OECD Teacher Community on Edmodo

Photo credit: @Shutterstock

Working together to build the culture of learning in the Netherlands

by Andreas Schleicher 
Director for Education and Skills, OECD

The Dutch are known for making a virtue of necessity. Now is a time when their reputation will be put to the test.

The Netherlands’ economy and society are being transformed by technological change, increased economic integration, population ageing, increased migration and other pressures. A highly skilled population with the opportunities, incentives and motivation to develop and use their skills fully and effectively will be essential for confronting the challenges and seizing the opportunities of the future. The Dutch skills system is strong compared to others internationally, but still the Dutch understand that for a small country with an open economy to remain competitive, it will need to reinforce the foundation of skills on which Dutch success has been built.

The OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report: Netherlands, published today, identifies nine key skills challenges for the Netherlands and three priority areas for action.

So what are the priority areas for action?

1. Fostering more equitable skills outcomes: The Dutch skills system works well to ensure that most people develop strong skills. Still, a large number of adults have very low levels of skills that mean they have trouble extracting information from longer and more complex texts or performing numerical tasks involving several steps. Too often these people are not actively engaged in learning to improve their skills. Older workers with still many years of working life ahead of them and migrants account for a sizable share of the low-skilled population. With the costs of marginalisation so high, and with an ageing population, the Netherlands cannot afford to waste its precious talent. 
2. Creating skills-intensive workplaces: Despite having comparatively highly skilled population, the Netherlands could use these skills more intensively at work. Small and medium-sized firms, especially, could do more to get the most out of the skills of their workers. The increased adoption of high performance workplace practices, in particular, has potential to foster greater skills use at work, resulting in higher productivity, wages and greater job satisfaction.
3. Promoting a learning culture: Despite many years of talk in the Netherlands about the importance of developing a learning culture and the introduction of a series of policy measures aimed at making it a reality, the country is still far from realising this aim, as evidenced by the low “readiness to learn” of Dutch adults when compared with their peers in other OECD countries. Many stakeholders confirm this assessment, finding that the Netherlands has much more to do in order to transform itself into a learning economy.

The OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report: Netherlands reflects the many valuable contributions received from four ministries, the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands and hundreds of stakeholders who shared their perspectives on what are the key skills challenges facing the country and their causes, and proposed some good practices for addressing these challenges.

In a series of workshops, the Dutch lived up to their reputation for frankness and self-reflection, with many claiming that too many people in the Netherlands were neither developing the “right” skills to succeed, nor taking sufficient responsibility for maintaining and further developing their skills in adulthood. Firms also came in for some criticism for not investing sufficiently in the skills of their workers. Stakeholders also lamented that fact the Netherlands was failing to live up to its ambitions for creating a learning society.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the Netherlands is one of collective action. Taking action in these priority areas will require that governments, individuals, employers, trade unions, education and training providers and others take joint responsibility and action. 

Along with presenting a number of specific recommendations for addressing the countries skills challenges, the OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report: Netherlands proposes the creation of skills strategy founded on a commitment to a “national skills pact” that goes beyond a virtuous “statement of intent”. One that would, at a minimum, be guided by a shared vision, specify the concrete actions that each partner needs to take, and establishes performance measures and clear public reporting requirements for all partners.

In the past, it took a whole of society effort to build the dikes and canals that protected the Netherlands from flooding and allowed it to reclaim land for habitation and cultivation. Today, the Dutch once again need to call upon their talent for collective action, this time to shore up the skills foundation upon which they will secure their future for generations to come.

Links

OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report: Netherlands

OECD National Skills Strategy

Survey of Adult Skills

For more on skills and skills policies around the world, visit: http://www.oecd.org/skills/

Follow the conversation on twitter: #OECDSkills

Join us on Edmodo

Photo source: Biking @shutterstock