Panel D.02 — Continuing Vocational Training in Italy, between Unresolved Issues and New Scenarios
Convenors Roberto Angotti (INAPP, Italy); Giovanna Campanella (Ismeri); Alberto Vergani (Università Cattolica di Milano)
Keywords Continuing Vocational Training, Adult learning, training policies, NRRP, public funding
Continuing Vocational Training (CVT) has acquired an increasingly central and crucial role in the development processes of knowledge and skills systems and, nowadays, it represents one of the main growing factors for the adult population and companies.
Continuing Vocational Training seems also to be at the core-attention of decision-makers in Italy after years. In line with the European policies, it is going through a season of transformations, also because of the launch of a set of new policy measures, most recently those included in the National New Skills Plan and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). CVT is therefore experiencing an extremely articulated situation, consisting of several national policy measures managed by different public administrations (both central and local) and many actors and stakeholders at various levels. Numbers, of participants and interventions, also show the recent increase of CVT relevance.
However, a number of issues remain unresolved: the equity of access to corporate training; the North-South dualism in the distribution of training opportunities; the resistance to change and modification of organizational models and practices; the effects of pandemic on corporate training choices and strategies (smart working, smart learning); the effects of digitalisation and the ecological transition on up-skilling and re-skilling processes in the workplace.
This is the framework for the proposed panel whose aim is twofold:
– to go deeper into the main key-questions that actually affect CVT in Italy;
– to explore some possible developments and improvements of CVT non-system (an expression which highlights the weak connection and coordination of the different actors and parts enacting CVT).
This aim will be pursued adopting the following three assumptions:
– that lifelong learning paradigm and, inside it, adult learning in general is the framework which gives CVT its sense, meaning and – hopefully – direction;
– that CVT has many forms and structures which refer to funding, objectives, initiative, implementation logics and mechanisms, profile. The heterogeneity must be made evident and recognized in order to clearly identify strengths, weaknesses and potentials of each one;
– that being CVT targeted to adults and focused on formalized learning, a crucial issue is method(s) which must design a sound connection between training settings and workplaces.
On this basis, the Panel proposes a series of research papers, recently published on Scuola Democratica (Special Issue, N. 1/2023), that deal with these topics in the context of the new policy scenario in the field of Vocational Education and Training at national and EU level. The panel will include a selection of articles published in the Special Issue (between 5 and 10) that will be presented by their authors.