The civil service raises the levels of employment and employability, reduces the inactivity rate, helps to reorient the professional choices of the young people who participate in it. All this regardless of the family background of origin. This is what emerges from a study by INAPP presented today during the webinar “Universal civil service: an opportunity for young people” organized by the Institute for the analysis of public policies in collaboration with the National Forum of the Third Sector and Arci Civil service. INAPP has built an “employability index” obtained from four macro-areas (training, activation, experiences, mobility), this index shows an increase of 12% for volunteers after the Civil Service.
Furthermore, 60% of the volunteers are employed two years after the experience, 50.1% of the ex-neet volunteers (people not engaged in study, neither work nor training); the inactive rate drops from 10% to 1.2% and, finally, 67% of the volunteers consider it useful for their professional project, while 20% have changed their minds about their future during this experience. The INAPP analysis therefore seems to support the choices made with the recent National Recovery and Resilience Plan which places the Civil Service among the active labor policy measures that are strategic for youth employment, so as to invest 650 million euros for the next three years. An acknowledgment to the Civil Service which since 2002, the year of the introduction of the measure, has involved over 500 thousand volunteers throughout the national territory.
“The Civil Service is configured as an effective tool with a view to enhancing the chances of finding employment as well as in terms of integration and reduction of the risk of social exclusion – explained prof. Sebastiano Fadda, president of INAPP – The effects of the pandemic tell us that it was above all young people who were most affected with the unemployment rate of those under 30 which is almost three times higher than that of older workers. The PNRR goes in the right direction, with a ‘vision’ not on young people as a problem, but on the problems of young people for whom the civil service can represent a real shock to enter the world of work ».
On the employment front, the significant incidence of the geographic area and qualification is confirmed, to the point that the young neets of the North reach 77% of employed people two years later. The level of employability after carrying out the civil service, on the other hand, increases broadly and across the board, regardless of the socio-personal profiles of the volunteers and their starting employability levels (+ 12%). However, it is important to highlight how the increase in employability levels affects more than half of the subjects (54%), just over 20% maintained stable levels and less than 25% recorded a slight decrease. Furthermore, the increase in employability is transversal with respect to the starting levels, even those who came from “low” or “very low” levels, after the civil service, have rather high levels of work placement. This result shows how the positive effect of the Civil Service on employability is distributed fairly evenly on all the volunteers involved and does not depend on the level of employability at the start.
In general, employability takes on higher values among women, it grows with age, among those coming from families with a high and medium-high background and, geographically, the split between the North and South of the country is confirmed, thus the general level of employability in our population is higher among the volunteers of the Center and the North than among the volunteers of the South and the Islands. Almost all of the participants (97%) would do the Civil Service again, 90% think they have increased their relational skills and have understood better things about themselves during this experience.
The numbers of the ordinary civil service
From 2001 to 2017, the civil service involved an average of 28 thousand young people a year, against a demand more than double compared to the places available, with peaks of about 86 thousand young people in the two years 2016 and 2017 equal to 0.49% and 0, 77% of the Italian population between 18 and 28 years of each year. In perspective, with the Reform of the Universal Civil Service which aims to initiate 100 thousand young people a year, the civil service could reach 1.55% of the reference population (2% of those who do not work), also thanks to the demographic decline.