Orientamento e Università: quale ruolo nello sviluppo dell’employability?

  Focus - Allegati
  09 May 2022
  27 minutes, 48 seconds

“Orientamento e Università: quale ruolo nello sviluppo dell’employability?”

Autori: Daniele Lapenna, Policy Analyst MIPP & Valeriana Savino, Policy Analyst MIPP

The poor Italian employment conditions in the last decade have placed graduates, undergraduates and PhDs facing the worrying risk of not being able to adequately apply their skills acquired during the long years of university education in the job’s market.

The university system supports students in the difficult task of developing their professional path. It is a "facilitator" in the transition between university and work through services such as career service and job placement. In addition to universities, numerous public and private bodies facilitate this difficult transition, including the InformaGiovani centers, the Junior Enterprise or digital freelancers such as Valentina Murace.

Between best practices and critical issues, it is hoped that universities will be more committed to providing "guaranteed internships" in collaboration with affiliated entities and to the establishment of the Placement Manager within the university centers, with the aim of promoting employability of young talent.

What we talk about?

1. Orienting yourself in a fluid job’s market
a. Strategic tool: job placement
b. The role of employability in active job search
2. Good practices
a. The QS Graduate Employability Rankings
b. InformaGiovani
c. Junior Enterprise
d. Valentina Murace - More Human, More Resources

3. Suggestions
a. "Guaranteed" internships
b. Placement Manager

Orienting yourself in a fluid job’s market

The development of an inclusive society takes place by balancing between professional and personal needs. As evidence of this, in recent times there has been a growing gap between these two types of needs, in favor of the perception of the person as homo economicus. Since the early 2000s, Italy's economic situation has been rather critical and employment rates (especially for young people and women) have been below the European average, despite slight signs of recovery in recent years. The economic and production crisis has caused a significant decrease in the number of employees and a decrease in permanent workers, especially among the youngest. This situation has placed graduates, undergraduates and PhDs facing the worrying risk of not being able to adequately apply their skills acquired during the long years of university education in the job’s market. With the emergence of increasingly fluid and flexible professional careers, transfers between different employers are increasingly frequent even in very different sectors, or even from possible periods of unemployment, during which it is desirable to invest in training. These circumstances have generated a general empowerment of people in their career choices. They tend to no longer rely on organizations, but have learned to juggle the complexity of the current job's world by building connections and relationships to develop a meaningful career that reconciles their passions and expectations, as well as the training they have received.

It is essential for all to follow passions, to reflect on their own characteristics, enhancing them in an increasingly dynamic and difficult to interpret market, also taking care of personal image (personal branding), to exploit the potential of social networks, to "surf" from a job to 'other, to participate continuously in training experiences, also acquiring skills to independently face the challenges of the job's market.

In this context, the role played by university career services is decisive in guaranteeing an
orientation service, through which to support students in this difficult task of active job search and development of their professional path. In this sense, much progress has been made by the university system to make itself a "facilitator", as well as an intermediary, of the transition between the academic world and the job's world.

The orientation activity within the University should be seen as an integrated process, aimed at providing support to the educational and professional planning of a person as a whole. Today it is necessary for young people to have both solid skills and self-orientation tools for the future. Skills represent the personal characteristics that a person puts into play when responding to stimuli from the external environment. These are the so-called "soft skills". The self-orientation tools, on the other hand, are the preparation of effective resumes, the cover letter, preparation for an effective job interview and digital reputation. Orientation is used to create training courses to correctly recognize the value of one's life experiences and develop one's ability to interact with entities outside the university, private companies and research institutes.

The orientation service is a fundamental tool of the third mission strategy, as it contributes to enhancing knowledge and highly qualified human capital and consequently strengthens the inclination of universities to support social well-being, technological advancement and economic growth of society and the territory. The third university mission is the propensity of academic structures to open up to the socio-economic context, exercised through the enhancement and transfer of knowledge.

At the same time, there are also critical issues such as the lack of economic resources and
personnel assigned to these services, insufficient connections between universities and local businesses, difficulties in monitoring the activities carried out and assessing their impact on the job placement of graduates, the absence of dialogue with other universities and other institutional subjects, as well as inadequate staff training, especially with regard to the enhancement of the skills necessary for the management of coaching services and individual interviews with students. These criticalities entail a serious loss for the entire placement service in terms of the efficiency of the universities of being a link between knowledge and the effective application of it.

A strategic tool: job placement

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, in Italy the "third mission" is the commitment made by universities to achieve social well-being, technological advancement and economic growth of society and the territory, making the knowledge they produce socially and economically usable. A third mission that is added to the traditional ones of teaching and research and which in some way constitutes the driving force of innovation. The profound changes that have affected the job’s market and the business world have prompted universities to review their role, so much so as to introduce the development of a new generation of universities, the University 4.0. Orientation is used to create training courses to recognize the value of one's life experiences and develop one's ability to interact with entities outside the university, private companies and research institutes.

This new training model (which has been defined as entrepreneurial) would consist of 3 main elements:
• profound changes in all three university missions: teaching, research, and the enhancement of knowledge;
• development of strong relationships with companies to satisfy production and the need for knowledge;
• stronger links with the job’s market to reduce the unemployment gap for graduates.

Thanks to this model, the role, functions and organizational models of the orientation and
placement services have been renewed. The paradigm of university placement services has changed over the years: initially it was centered on the counseling model, later on the networking paradigm, up to the new model centered on connections which provides for involvement in the responsibility of the university regarding the future employment of students.

The Job Placement service in Italy was established by the Biagi law n ° 276 10/09/2003. It deals with the intermediation between job supply and demand for graduates and students of Italian universities looking for work. The role of university services has been included in the framework of the employment services network. Before the 2000s, universities had a role similar to that of placement: to point out the most deserving students or graduates. Subsequently it was necessary to legalize this phenomenon to help improve the transparency of the job’s market. Therefore, the universities have been entrusted with the new mission of establishing contact with the socio-economic environment through the promotion and transfer of knowledge.

The university's intermediary function allows students to easily introduce them to the job market and has therefore become an important tool for building employability. The services provided by the universities include a range of activities such as recruitment, professional training, psychological counseling and career planning. The goal is to build a network through numerous activities and specific plans for networking around the university with the aim of improving communication with companies that can provide training and job opportunities for students. Placement services, therefore, were created with the aim of supporting university students, providing guidance on career choices, as well as facilitating their integration into the world of work.

The role of employability in active job search

As has been pointed out, the crucial importance of tools and practices such as career guidance and job placement in the context of university environments is therefore indisputable. In addition to these aids that act as a channel, the demand for work matches the offer also through other means. When addressing the issue of employment, the concept of employability is sometimes underestimated (or deliberately neglected). It is of Anglophone origin and it is difficult to translate it into Italian.

The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) defines employability as "a combination of factors (such as job-specific skills and soft skills) which enable individuals to progress towards or enter into employment, stay in employment and progress during their careers"(1). This is certainly not the only possible definition among those offered by the sociological literature. Depending on the concept to be emphasized, this concept can include a more or less wide variety of factors, starting from the subjective-individual ones (such as personal skills) up to the macro-situational ones (such as the characteristics of a specific job). We believe that when it comes to employability the right question to ask is: how attractive is a person in the eyes of an employer? And what are the individual chances of being professionally employed in the job market?

The variables that can affect these chances are so many that it would be impossible to deal with them all here. Placing for the purposes of this analysis the focus on the "employability" of students entering the world of work, and excluding the specific conditions of the reference market, we can argue that there are two subjective macro-factors to pay particular attention to: the person's ability to make accurate choices based on the context and the person's ability to efficiently and effectively search for a job.

The first factor is certainly the most complex, but it can still be summarized in a single question that a job seeker should ask himself: how can I maximize my attractiveness in the eyes of an employer? Although "simple" as a question, it is accompanied by many other considerations, but above all it can involve an equally long and difficult series of choices for everyone to make. Among these, first of all, there is the choice of training to undertake, and consequently which skills to offer to the world of work. A clear representation of this is offered by the phenomenon of the so-called skills mismatch, i.e. the lack of overlap between the qualifications possessed by the workforce and those actually required by employers. According to the Future Skills Architect (FSA) developed by Boston Consulting Group, Italy has nearly 10 million workers affected by this competitive gap.
The analysis of demand and the consequent modeling of (one's) offer is therefore a necessary process to be implemented to maximize one's employment opportunity.

On the other hand, as regards the person's ability to efficiently and effectively seek employment, two concepts are fundamental: "personal branding" and "web reputation". Personal branding can be defined as "the conscious and intentional effort to create and influence public perception of an individual by positioning them as an authority in their industry, elevating their credibility, and differentiating themselves from the competition, to ultimately advance their career, increase their circle of influence, and have a larger impact "(2). If on the one hand personal branding consists of an active process of influencing and creating potentially fruitful contacts in professional terms, on the other hand web reputation is the perception that other online users have of us and of their approval. In both cases (in creating a relevant network and in creating a profile that can be relevant in a process of so-called "social recruiting"), the responsibility to improve their ability to "sell themselves" by exploiting the tools offered by the world online is for aspiring workers.

Good practices

The QS Graduate Employability Rankings

The QS Graduate Employability Rankings allow you to acquire data relating to the universities that produce the most employable graduates. Today the importance of taking a degree that provides the skills and qualities required by modern employers is certain.

According to the 2022 ranking in Italy, the Politecnico di Milano was positioned at the top of the ranking, followed by the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, Sapienza University of Roma, Politecnico of Torino, Cattolica del Sacro Cuore University, University of Padova, University of Milano, University of Trento, University of Torino, University of Milano-Bicocca. These are the top ten universities in the ranking that have demonstrated the highest ability to generate graduates with the transversal skills required by the modern working environment. In the ranking it is interesting to note the "Partnership with employers" indicator, where the highest score is taken by the University of Padua. This ranking makes it possible to identify the most efficient career services (career and orientation services offered to students) in the Italian national territory.

The Career Service of the Politecnico of Milano assists students during their studies and after graduation, providing professional orientation. Over 200 companies participate in annual on-campus job fairs, and every week, companies are invited to the campus to meet students.

The Job Placement of the Alma Mater Studiorum of the University of Bologna offers activities such as writing an effective CV, writing a targeted cover letter and simulating the selection interview. In addition to the Job Offers Bulletin Board and the Job Placement UniBo app, it proposes initiatives to meet companies, opportunities to get in touch with company representatives and to guide the professions in order to facilitate the possibility of job placement.

AlmaLaurea statistics state that over 45% of all graduates (first cycle graduates who do not
continue their studies, master's and combined cycle graduates) obtain regular employment within one year of graduation. This percentage rises to 71% after three years and to 78% after five years. The same surveys report that 74.2% of graduates would choose the same course at the University of Bologna.

It is essential to know and analyze the activities of the main career services of Italian universities:

At the "Luigi Bocconi" Commercial University of Milan, a single centralized service manages all relations with companies, including those necessary to activate curricular internships. This service is used to build and maintain a stable and continuous relationship with companies directed by a single subject (eg often from curricular internships to extracurricular internships for the same subject).

The University of Tor Vergata in Rome has a central office for communications with companies that sorts contacts to university faculties. The University of Verona is considering establishing a contact person for relations with the territory for each department, in order to coordinate with the central placement office.

The University of Firenze career service works closely with the study courses. Every aspect of the activities carried out is supported by research. In particular, there are 8 Career Service offices with as many managers located in 8 different service points (assistance points) corresponding to the different universities to facilitate reception, and 12 Delegates to the Job Placement of the 10 University Schools. All refer to the Delegate for Job Placement and the Vice-Rector for Technological Innovation and relations with businesses.

The universities of Palermo, Messina and Catania have formed a regional network to build a network with businesses. In order to develop relationships and partnerships with businesses, a technical-political table was created at the University of Messina to promote institutional agreements for the feasibility and verification of professional employment needs.

The Politecnico of Torino has promoted initiatives to involve intermediate bodies such as
Confindustria and the Industrial Union to promote apprenticeships.

Orientation and career activities are not carried out only by universities. There are in fact
numerous public and private bodies operating at national level offering activities such as provision of guidance, training and career advice. Here we wanted to focus on three entities: InformaGiovani, Junior Enterprise and Valentina Murace.


InformaGiovani

“InformaGiovani is a public service that promotes information, orientation and participation
through an integrated multi-channel communication plan aimed at the cultural growth of the new generations” .

The first Information Centers were born in the 1960s in Belgium and France. In the first case they had an extra-institutional and markedly social origin, while in the second case they were born at the behest of the Government aspiring to a national organizational structure. Since the late 1960s, the Youth Information Centers have experienced an exponential development in terms of services offered and new centers opened, especially in Central and Western Europe.

In Italy the first InformaGiovani was born in Turin in 1982, quickly followed by those of Milan, Verona and Forlì. From that moment the will of the local administrators allowed their widespread diffusion throughout the Italian territory and they were adopted as real tools of youth policies. The promotion and coordination of European cooperation in the field of information and orientation for young people is entrusted to the non-governmental and non-profit association ERYICA - European association for information and advice for young people - to which the Italian National Youth Information Coordination adheres, together with that of the other European partner countries.

InformaGiovani is therefore a public service, with free access and usable for free, whose main objective is to respond to requests for information and guidance from young citizens, so as to promote their human and social growth, together with the socio-economic growth of the country as a whole. This service is undoubtedly included in the best practices of this policy paper by virtue of the services that are most appreciated and enjoyed by users: training orientation and guidance for active job search. Desks for university students with numerous consulting functions are active at the Youth Information Centers: informing young people about the offers of degree courses and the relative benefits offered by bodies for the right to education. Also noteworthy is the possibility of taking advantage of re-motivation and reorientation interviews, aimed at supporting the student in
analyzing and addressing the difficulties encountered during their studies.
They also offer many professional information services that help citizens look for a job, always putting the peculiarities of each person first. Among them are consultancy services for writing CV and motivation letter, support in identifying professional goals based on skills and aspirations, guidance on research channels, or suggestions to successfully support a work interview.

Junior Enterprise

Junior Enterprises (JE) are a virtuous example of non-profit organizations able to narrow the distance between the university and the professional world, as formalized in the Oslo European Agenda for entrepreneurship education. Usually, such associations are founded within single universities, and their members are required to be students of the same university to join.

These originated in France in the late 1960s, and then spread widely to the rest of Europe between the 1980s and 1990s. In Italy, the first JEs were those of the LUISS University (1987) and of the Bocconi University (1988). To date, the European JE network has around 31,000 students and 280 spread across 15 countries. Worldwide, the JE phenomenon is also spreading to Brazil, China and North America. JEs offer a wide range of advisory services depending on the strategy of each individual institution.

Among the most frequent business segments are management consulting, legal, marketing, communication, IT and many more. In this way, student-member associations have the opportunity to live a professional experience that is likely to be a corporate one in the strict sense, developing projects, initiatives, collaborating with their colleagues, and coming into contact with organizational-company dynamics. The basic concept of the JE is that of "learning by doing", that is, to provide members with the opportunity to put into practice the knowledge acquired at the university in the working world, developing their managerial and entrepreneurial skills.


Valentina Murace - More Human, More Resources

Valentina Murace is a young girl passionate about Human Resources and sustainable development with a specialization in Selection, Training, and Development of human resources. His mission is to value the human side of talent. She founded a blog to inform young people, talking about work and training with the aim of focusing on the career development of young people.

Her business focuses on free career counseling for a community of over 7,000 young people to help them acquire the skills and experience they need day by day to do their dream job. She collaborates with companies, start-ups and other communities to offer free webinars covering topics such as networking, personal branding, assessment center, CV writing, cover letters and interviews. She also shares internship offers, scholarship opportunities for free courses, masters and educational events on her blog. In addition, she creates freebies, i.e. contents of any theme in different possible forms shared for free, and toolkit, toolbox, on different themes related to career development. The type of information provided by this young girl is certainly a source from which to draw in order to
increase the elementary/main notions relating to the development of her career.

Suggestions

"Guaranteed" internships

The internship currently represents one of the most important and widespread guidance tools available to both educational institutions and the students themselves. It consists, precisely, of a "period of orientation and training, carried out in a working context and aimed at introducing young people to the job’s world ". In particular, curricular internships are for young people attending an education or training course aimed at integrating the knowledge acquired during the course of study with work experience. At the end of the training experience, the so-called CFU - University Training Credits - are obtained due to the fact that the internship must be understood as an integral part of the student's path to acquire the necessary skills required by the professional profile they aspire to. The internship experience arises from the need to empower students to the profession, offering them the opportunity to learn empirically, immersing them in work contexts in which the coaching of professionals guarantees not only an educational benefit, but also of development of a social dimension and an inclination towards professional belonging.
Pursuant to the D.M. 142 of 25 March 1998, the start of the internship is subject to the stipulation of an agreement between the promoter (university, high school, employment agency, training center, etc.) and the host (company, professional firm, cooperative, public body, etc.), in which the conditions and terms for conducting the internship activity are defined. The agreement provides for the stipulation of a so-called internship project, which describes the training objectives, the proposed pedagogical model, the indicators for evaluating the trainee's performance, as well as the appointment of a tutor who will help the trainee in his insertion in the new context, in monitoring the training path and in the certification of the activity carried out.

A virtuous example of how the practice of internships has become an integral and indispensable part of some academic training courses in Italy is offered by degree courses in the health professions. In the attachments to the Ministerial Decree of 19 February 2009 it is made clear that "The achievement of professional skills is implemented through theoretical and practical training [...] that is achieved in the specific work context of each profile, so as to ensure, at the end of the training course, full mastery of all the necessary skills and their immediate use in the workplace. Of particular importance, as an integral and qualifying part of professional training, is the practical training activity and clinical training, carried out with at least 60 CFU under the supervision and guidance of specially assigned professional tutors, [...] ".

Each university center identifies the locations for the professional internship within the health and social structures in the area, signing agreements with them, so that the internship experience is made available to its students. According to the terms of the agreement, the institutions welcome a certain number of trainees from the sponsoring university on a regular basis. In this way, the university plays a very important role as a facilitator, channeling its students towards a targeted path and relieving them of the responsibility of individually finding the internship experience.
Although this mechanism involves a dynamic of the student's de-responsibility in the act of active research of the internship, it is also true that during the years of training, students find themselves in a disadvantaged position as regards the contractual power in their interaction with possible host organizations. For this reason, students are too often forced to settle for the first internship experiences carried out in less than optimal conditions, as well as in contexts and roles far from the disciplinary field of their specialization, therefore forced to reinvent themselves.

A similar approach, but with different purposes, is sometimes adopted by some private training institutions. These centers make their training offer more attractive thanks to the "guaranteed internship" formula, promising all or part of their members the certainty of carrying out an internship experience, usually at the end of the course, at professional organizations with which the institution has signed an agreement, thus ensuring the possibility of having a first work experience consistent with their studies.

Extending these practices to all degree courses could prove to be a useful tool for facilitating career guidance, as well as finding post-graduate employment. In fact, from the XXIII Survey (2021) on the employment condition of graduates carried out by the AlmaLaurea Interuniversity Consortium, it appears that those who have carried out a curricular internship during their studies are 12.2% more likely to be employed in a year from graduation with respect to those who have not carried out this activity. A regulatory provision, similar to the aforementioned Ministerial Decree of 19 February 2009,
which places the emphasis on the mandatory traineeship experience for all degree courses, does not represent the optimal solution for the implementation of a guaranteed internship system. This is mainly due to the obvious difficulty that students would face if their university career was blocked by the impossibility of carrying out a curricular internship. As mentioned above, the employment opportunity is the result of the meeting between job supply and demand, and not a unilateral choice.

On the other hand, projects that are the result of the individual initiative of the university centers would be more feasible. To date, university institutions are "limited" to establishing agreements with the host organization, containing the legal data relating to the two parties and the general indications governing the internship. A greater commitment could be made by universities, in this phase of "negotiation", in obtaining from the host institution the promise of activating a predefined number of curricular internships on a time basis. The availability of this internship opportunity could also be associated with the development of seminars, workshops or even entire courses aimed at deepening the issues relevant to the affiliated entities. In this case, the participation of experts from the same host institution in the delivery of the lessons would be more than desirable and profitable. In this way, the students benefiting from the experience would immediately have the opportunity to witness the practical application of the theoretical notions just assumed.

Access to these internships could easily be subordinated to the normal procedures through which universities are used to assign benefits of all kinds: calls for participation in which merit and student participation are rewarded, taking into consideration the career in its entirety and their aptitude for subjects relevant to the internship. Obviously, the participation of the host body in the selection phase is essential. This system based on the active commitment of universities to find a certain number of guaranteed curricular internship experiences could respond to numerous needs: it would create an incentive to
deepen study subjects, if access to the guaranteed internship was associated with a reward system similar to that of scholarships for merit; it would offer the certainty of a first professional experience which does not dissociate itself from one's own course of study, but which instead gives the possibility of giving practical application to the theoretical notions acquired; or again, it would ensure contractual conditions that take into account the protection of the student, aiming for the best possible internship experience


Placement manager

The territorial rooting of the university increases trust and a sense of identity and belonging (externally but also above all internally), which allows the various subjects involved to take action with passion also in the realization of training and orientation programs and work placement of students. In the university system, the objectives have become increasingly specific such as preparing and training students to develop their careers and assisting them in drafting a CV rather than preparing for a job interview. The biggest goal is to be able to involve and make students adhere to a career and future option and to connect them with the different subjects that circulate around the university and the possible opportunities that may arise from them. All this must be done in a personalized way for each student in such a way as to ensure individualized attention and a
practice of continuous student support. In the orientation activities offered by the national universities, university employees have the joint responsibility of helping students to build a professional life project.

In placement services, in several cases the service operators have profiles oriented only towards a formal approach with students as mentioned above. The services offered by career services should primarily focus no longer on placement, but their focus should be on helping students understand who they are, identify what they want and find out how they can get it, enabling them to choose and plan their own relative path, building a personalized career and development path. In order to make universities a strategic place that can make students aware of what they are, their interests, their attitudes and what they would like to be in the future, a figure to be implemented would be a Qualifying Tutor who can support students in their university training path. The Qualifying Tutor's
job is to help students discover passions that can affect their lives in order to strengthen their identity. A new professional profile that is able to promote connections at all levels and relationships and can support students in a personalized, differentiated and multifaceted way to facilitate the development of themselves, their careers and consequently employability, in order to access to a job that enhances the training received and allows to obtain professional satisfaction for each student and at the same time a benefit for the community and for the economy. This figure should support students from the first year of university, organizing ad personam interviews with students of each year to deepen their choice and accompany them to the last step achieved with graduation. It would be an innovative figure within the placement service, because it would offer
each student the opportunity to deal directly with a third person about their university training, their passions, their skills, their expectations; it would allow ad hoc consultancy to discern the various job opportunities; would involve a dissemination and greater awareness of guidance services within each research faculty/department. This could involve a change in the identity of the service: from a simple counselor to a facilitator able to lead communities and develop meaningful connections between graduates and businesses.

Translated by Simona Taravella

Notes:

(1) “Combinazione di fattori quali le competenze specifiche del lavoro e le competenze trasversali che permettono agli individui di avanzare o entrare nel mondo del lavoro, rimanere all’interno del mondo lavorativo, progredire nella carriera.”

(2) “Lo sforzo consapevole e intenzionale per creare e influenzare la percezione pubblica di un individuo posizionando come un’autorità nel proprio settore, elevando la sua credibilità e differenziandosi dalla concorrenza, per far avanzare infine la propria carriera, aumentare la propria cerchia di influenza e avere un impatto maggiore.”

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