If the five calls to wire the country, supported with funds from the PNRR, were closed in less than a year, now is the time to literally put down the 5.5 billion investments they foresee. In the sense that excavators, general workers, drivers and foremen are needed to start the civil excavation works. But they are not found. The companies in the sector, gathered in the Anie System integrator Tlc group, are thus hypothesising to bring a substantial part of workers from non-EU countries.
A less simple operation than you think because it takes almost 20 thousand people (19,600 Anie estimate, to be precise). Between 12 and 13 thousand will be additional to those already in the companies, where a retraining of workers already present on civil works has also started.
The full-bodied game is a bit of a sum of all the themes of our labor market: the misalignment of skills, the lack of workers tout court, the rather long times to train people who are not active or without skills, the competition due to departure of numerous construction sites ranging from 110% to those of large infrastructures, the wages and timing to be respected, the works must in fact be ready by 2026. In a context like this, Luigi Piergiovanni, president of the System Integrator Tlc Group of Anie, involved in the race against time of companies to find people, the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Labor to which he clearly says: “There is a strong gap in human resources on the path of broadband”.
The Undersecretary of Economic Development, Anna Ascani, acknowledges that today «to wire the country we need professional skills that are not there» and for this very reason «we are working with the Ministry of Labor to accelerate the recruitment of skills. We are working on it with the Ministry and the regions, because there is a need for professional training ». In a meeting held yesterday in Rome, which was attended by the managers of various companies that have won the tenders and that will have to contract the works to network companies, Anie explained in detail both the works and the needs of human resources than of machines.
«In the first phase it is mainly civil works, excavation, earth moving, roofing, which will require 8,250 people. These works represent 42% of the total and are the ones that worry us most », continues Piergiovanni. For several reasons. First of all, «we are talking about work that is done as a team: each team is made up of four people, excavator driver, general worker, driver and foreman. It is enough if only one is missing that the team is at zero ”, observes the manager. Furthermore, it takes quite a long time to train this type of workers. For an employee of specialized vehicles we speak of 12 months, for a driver of 10 months, for a general worker of 6 months and for a foreman of 12 months.