Digital skills main driver for employing the under 30

In addition to technical-specialist IT skills, innovative 4.0 management and digital communication, soft skills, i.e. organizational, social and relational and communicative skills, are increasingly being added. The integration, or more correctly the hybridization, between digital skills and transversal skills is an issue of strategic importance and of close topical relevance that concerns professions and sectors of economic activity and, above all, fashion companies, grappling with important retail strategies that integrate online and offline. As the volume 2019 on "digital skills" highlights, the overview of digital and the related world of work in Italy has many facets and is evolving. The study has been published by the Excelsior Information System which, carried out by Unioncamere and Anpal (National Agency for Active Labour Policies), has been one of the main sources available in Italy on labour market and training issues since 1997 and is included among the official mandatory response surveys provided by the National Statistical Programme.

Companies are looking for a mix of skills consisting of basic digital skills and mathematical and computer skills

The publication highlights the investments in digital transformation of Italian companies, the digital skills required by the business world, the process of digital changes in the system of professions, the qualifications required by the world of work, and concludes with an overview of young people and eskill.

Moreover, as the volume highlights, digital skills can be a key driver for the employment of under-30s. The demand for new employees under 30 years of age is constant for all types of digital skills analyzed, in fact the values are in a range between 26.7 and 28 percent of young people under 30 within the total planned income in 2019 to which digital skills are required.

In terms of digital skills, the study shows that the employment programmes monitored by the Excelsior Information System highlight different skill needs, or more correctly, digital skill sets, depending on the degree of digitization of the company and, more generally, the state of adoption of new technologies, new organizational and business models.

Alongside companies that require digital skills with a high degree of importance, others, although they consider them necessary, give them a lower degree of importance. Equally important, there are also companies that express an integrated need for more digital skills, i.e. an eskill mix in which two or more skills are combined, while others still appear to be focused on a single skill.

Companies are positioned in different ways on the path towards digitisation and there are multiple strategies adopted by companies to address the transformation taking place. The rich wealth of information collected over the years by the Excelsior System makes it possible to capture and analyze the evolutions in the demand for skills of companies, with particular attention to the eskill mix that companies are moving towards.

The analysis shows that it is the basic digital skills that are most sought after by companies, giving them a high degree of importance in the selection of human resources. They are requested from 1,019 thousand profiles (equal to 22 percent of total program revenue for 2019), followed by mathematical computer skills (requested from 779 thousand profiles, equal to 17 percent of the total) and skills related to 4.0 (requested from 528 thousand profiles, equal to 11 percent of total revenue).

Moreover, in 2019, out of a total programmed revenue of more than 4.6 million, there are more than 1.4 million job profiles to which companies have requested at least one of the three e-skills with a high degree of importance. In other words, for 3 out of the 10 profiles planned to be entered by companies, it is considered strategic to have at least one of the three e-skills surveyed by the Excelsior survey (30.4 percent of total planned revenues) to better deal with the changes taking place.

In parallel with the growing digitization that is investing Italy, the need for an increasingly articulated mix of digital skills able to face and govern change is creeping in and spreading in companies. Depending on the company's development programs and the investments made to take advantage of the opportunities related to the changes taking place, companies are expressing a certain need for more integrated digital skills.

The Excelsior Information System notes that, at the moment, companies are mainly looking for a mix of skills made up of basic digital skills and mathematical and IT skills (required by about 270 thousand of the professional profiles sought) to which is added a mix that combines these two skills, the skills related to 4.0.

This article was originally published on FashionUnited.IT, translated and edited to English.

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