In the public debate on employment in Italy, a seemingly simple narrative has taken hold: on the one hand, companies complain about difficulties in finding staff, often highly skilled, while on the other, a significant proportion of people are either looking for work or employed in precarious positions, or have skills that are not in demand on the market. This apparent paradox raises a fundamental question: is there really a shortage of candidates, or is the Italian labor market structurally unresponsive to non-linear career paths? The question is not trivial, since a high availability of workers who are not absorbed by the market is a sign worthy of attention.
The answer probably does not lie in a clear-cut contrast. Rather, a deeper problem emerges that concerns the overall functioning of the production system and the way in which skills are formed and used.
A first key to understanding this lies in the structure of the Italian economy. The business fabric is largely made up of small and medium-sized enterprises: it should be noted that the 2023 Permanent Business Census conducted by Istat involved 280,000 businesses with three or more employees, i.e., 22.5% of Italian businesses, which produce 85.1% of the national added value and employ 74.7% of the workforce (13.1 million) and 96.0% of employees (11.5 million), constituting a fundamental segment of the production system.
These are often businesses with small workforces, informal organizations, and limited investment margins. In this context, the search for personnel tends to favor immediately operational profiles with specific experience in the sector or in the required job. This is not necessarily a matter of cultural rigidity or resistance to change: for many companies, it is a choice dictated by concrete constraints of cost, time, and risk.
Hiring someone to train means making an investment that is not always sustainable, especially when competitive pressure is high and productivity remains stagnant. As a result, the preference for vertical careers—built within the same professional or industrial field—becomes a strategy for reducing uncertainty. Sectoral experience is considered a guarantee of rapid adaptation and immediate performance.
However, the same model that favors specialization contributes to one of the most discussed problems in recent years: the so-called mismatch between the supply and demand of skills. Many companies complain about the difficulty of finding suitable candidates, while some workers struggle to find employment or advance professionally. This is not simply a numerical shortage of available people, but a qualitative gap between what companies are looking for and what the education system and the market produce.
This gap is accentuated by certain historical characteristics of the Italian context. The importance attached to formal qualifications, the segmentation between professions, and the limited availability of continuing education programs make the transition between different sectors or functions more complex. Changing jobs can mean starting almost from scratch, both in terms of financial recognition and professional credibility. In many cases, transferable skills—such as the ability to learn quickly, manage projects, or integrate different types of knowledge—are considered less relevant than familiarity with specific processes and technologies.
Meanwhile, however, the economy is changing. Digitalization, organizational innovation, and the growing interconnection between productive activities are changing the very content of work. Increasingly, companies need profiles capable of moving between different functions, combining technical and interpersonal skills, and adapting to changing contexts. In other words, there is an increasing demand for hybrid professionals and continuous learning.
This highlights a clear tension. On the one hand, the Italian production model—based on a widespread presence of small businesses and a culture of incremental specialization—has guaranteed competitiveness and flexibility for decades. On the other hand, the same model may prove less suited to supporting rapid transitions and non-linear career paths. The result is a widespread feeling of stagnation: companies struggle to find the skills they deem necessary, while workers perceive limited opportunities for retraining or growth outside their original field.
This does not mean that specialization is a limitation in itself. In many sectors, especially manufacturing and technical, accumulated experience is a decisive factor in quality and productivity. Similarly, not all organizations can afford advanced human resource management models or structured reskilling programs. The point, rather, is to understand how to balance the need for deep skills with the need for greater adaptability.
The issue, therefore, is not just about the behavior of individual companies or the individual choices of workers. It is a systemic issue that involves training policies, contractual models, incentives for innovation, and investment capacity. Promoting more cross-functional careers requires not only a cultural change, but also concrete tools: accessible training courses, recognition of skills acquired in different contexts, and greater integration between education and the world of work.
Ultimately, the debate on the difficulty of finding candidates risks remaining superficial if it is reduced to a clash of responsibilities. Rather than determining whether there is a "shortage of workers" or whether "the market is too rigid," we need to ask ourselves how to transform a system built for stability into one capable of accompanying change. The challenge is not only about employment, but also concerns the quality of economic development and the country's ability to adapt to a historical phase characterized by profound technological and demographic transitions.