Career and training paths for those who want to work in digital have become as complex as ever. This was highlighted by Gloria Gazzano President of AICA during the D-Avengers event held these days in Milan at the prestigious venue of the School of Management of Bocconi University.
Recruitment, race against time
Companies, in order to fill increasingly hybrid roles, are now looking for new skills and competencies, not necessarily technical ones even for more classic ICT figures. Inevitably, a gap is created between research and recruitment opportunities that companies find difficult to bridge. Training companies, such as F1 Consulting & Services, are therefore at the forefront of this battle against time. In fact, within a few years, there will be a shortage of tens of thousands of specialized profiles in Italy. This will happen because of both the sharp decline in population and the number of skills required for new positions. However, the market is growing: the number of job ads in 2017 (source WollyBI) on the web targeting ICT profiles nationwide was 64 thousand. The increase over 2016 is 7 percent. Companies’ inquiries are polarizing to the developer and ICT Consultant worlds, which together make up nearly two-thirds of the ads on the Web.

ICT pathways: no digital skills and soft skills make a difference?
To intervene in ICT profiling I know no longer solely “educational qualifications” but rather a set of skills (including non-digital) and soft skills that acquire increasingly decisive roles in the selection phase. Really interesting analysis of data from the Digital Skills Observatory promoted by the Italian ICT Associations in collaboration with MIUR and the Digital Italy Agency. In fact, we find that the DSR (Digital Skill Rate), which estimates the incidence of digital skills compared to the total number of those in demand, has considerable variations even within technical occupations with values as low as 18 percent up to 56 percent. Bridging these gaps, then, are non-digital and soft skills, which are now increasingly important in defining job profile characteristics.
