Government support for training and recruitment
An agreement between the Italian government and the country’s leathergoods and footwear sectors to boost their search for new talent is now in place.
The presidents of Assopellettieri and Assocalzaturifici, Italy’s associations for leathergoods manufacturers and footwear producers, Claudia Sequi and Giovanna Ceolini, have welcomed the formal signing of a new memorandum of understanding between the Italian government and companies in these two sectors. The wider fashion industry is also part of the agreement. Italy’s minister for education, Giuseppe Valditara, was one of the guests of honour at Mipel and Micam in Milan this February. His visit provided the ideal platform for the formal signing of the document, which addresses the need for better links between Italy’s high-school-level technical institutes (ITS) and companies in leather and footwear.
Shoe and leather companies believe this will make it easier for them to bring talented young people with digital skills into the workforce, which currently has an average age of around 55. At the same time, these companies are committing to closer involvement in the education that ITS students receive, including sending technicians and other knowledgeable people into classrooms to contribute to the teaching programmes there.
“This memorandum of understanding is extraordinarily innovative,” Giuseppe Valditara says. “It is almost revolutionary.” It will bring in a programme that the minister calls ‘Four Plus Two’. Young people will receive four years of high-school education in ITS institutes, with increased input from companies, and then complete their preparation for life in the business world with two further years of study and work experience.
According to Assocalzaturifici president, Giovanna Ceolini, training new generations in the skills and disciplines involved in handcraft is of “vital importance”. She continues: “We have to bring young people into our companies. The work we can offer them is wonderful work; it grabs you from the very first.” She cannot envisage an Italian footwear industry that will cease to need people to do this work. She insists that there are tasks in the production of high-end shoes for which “we cannot not use our hands”. The hands and the head have to work in harmony, she explains.
Involved by association
National business federation Confindustria has been closely involved in drawing the document up. It has a section for the whole of the fashion industry and, underneath that, sections for different parts of the fashion supply chain, including ‘accessories’, which footwear and leathergoods fit into. In addition to their roles at Assocalzaturifici and Assopellettieri, Giovanna Ceolini, is also president of this ‘accessories’ branch of Confindustria; Claudia Sequi is its vice-president. Ms Ceolini joined the minister in signing the new memorandum of understanding in Milan, as did the current president of the main fashion branch of Confindustria, Luca Sburlati.
“One of the good things,” Mr Sburlati tells World Leather, “is that it will now be compulsory for the ITS schools to build connections with businesses and for businesses to do the same in reverse.” He feels that people often overlook the importance to Italy’s economy of the wider fashion sector. “I think it is important for us to be clear about the data,” he says. “Italian fashion, including all the products we make from leather, has a value of €90 billion per year. It is Italy’s second-biggest source of export revenues with almost €70 billion per year. Our sectors are the providers of direct employment for half a million people, and to this we could add another half a million people who work in retail selling our products here in Italy.”
A question Luca Sburlati poses is if Italy wants the fashion sector to continue to be a strategic part of its economy. “If the answer is yes, the measures we are taking with the new memorandum of understanding will be fundamental, because another factor is that the average age of the people working in our industries at the moment, at 55, is high. We need a change in our strategy for education and training, and we need it quickly. Our regional and national governments have an important role to play in this, but so do we as businesses and as Confindustria.”
What is needed in response to this challenge is a mix of technology and people, he says. Technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), which can help in activities such as making prototypes and product planning, is important, but it cannot do everything. Even in the next 20 years, Mr Sburlati thinks it will be impossible to develop AI that will be able to create and make products. “Robots will simply not be capable of stitching the way we need to stitch our products,” he insists. “We will still need this mix of both, of people and technology.”
The human part
Giovanna Ceolini is in agreement. Part of her conviction stems from an insistence that it would simply be wrong “to abandon our traditions”. She admires “the giant steps” that technology providers have made in developing advanced solutions to help companies make bags, shoes and other products. Further advances will certainly follow, she says, but she insists that it is the other part of the mix, the human part, that sets Italian companies and their products apart. Her point is that if you could install technology to do this work in its entirety, you would be able to install it in lots of places around the world, places with fewer taxes and lower labour and energy costs.
If human hearts, minds, passions and, of course, hands are the differentiating factor, it is all the more important to start making this clear to young people while they are in school, Ms Ceolini continues, for it to be part of their education in the same way as geography and mathematics are. She believes company representatives sharing their knowledge and passion with students will help young people understand and embrace this culture. “People from our industry, people who know what they are talking about will be there, handing on their knowledge,” she explains. “This will include knowledge of the leather we use, inviting our young people to start building up their knowledge of it too, helping them understand what our work is about. This will be a big step forward.”
Road to revolution
This is in line with the way government minister Giuseppe Valditara talks about the new agreement, albeit without his references to its being “almost revolutionary”. The minister insists that early figures he has seen for ITS establishments across Italy signing up to be part of the new programme are “truly extraordinary”. He welcomes the change. He says it has come after a long period in which technical education in Italy was going down “a regressive path”. He explains that what he means by this is that this part of the educational offering in Italy had become too theoretical. “Instead of being about producing wonderful workers with extraordinary technical knowledge and skills, it had come to be about culture more than anything else,” he continues. “And in this way, we arrived at the point of our manufacturing companies struggling to find the qualified technical people they need to confront the challenges of the future.”
This is why stronger links from now on between schools and the world of work are fundamental, Mr Valditara says. He even argues that resistance to Four Plus Two among “some political groups and some trade unions” are an indication of the problem. “They think Four Plus Two is a way of allowing businesses to exploit our students and young people,” he says. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We want to bring those young people into the world of work.”
The minister insists that, for too long, there had been a tendency to think that working with your hands was a sign of a lack of intelligence. “This thinking has caused a lot of damage to our schools and to our companies,” he continues. “Handcraft is a wonderful expression of intelligence.”
Credit: WTP/Flaticon
