There are just a few days left to register for the 34 ITS courses activated this year in Emilia-Romagna (the deadline is 13 October) but it is already time to take stock: in a few months not only the offer of dual post-diploma training for super-technicians it has been enriched in the region with seven other specialist courses, but the response from the boys has exceeded expectations (over 1,120 registrations already formalized on 850 places available and 40% of requests from the fair sex, a record) . The paradox is that these numbers and the unsatisfied hunger of companies with highly professional technical profiles clashes with an almost total ignorance among Italian families of the new opportunities for post-graduate study as an alternative to the university, despite the strong commitment of the country and of the ‘Emilia-Romagna, benchmark region for higher technical institutes. Themes at the center of the meeting organized by the ITS Polytechnic School Association of Emilia-Romagna (which for a few months has brought together all the 7 ITS Foundations of the region) at the Museum of Industrial Heritage in Bologna entitled “Skills for the future – The challenge of ITS “.
The ITS, these strangers
The ITS with their two-year study-work training proposal after high school with an amount of hours almost equally distributed between the classroom and the company (a path for about 75% convertible into university credits) are in fact struggling to “get out of hiding despite the record of employability among graduates: 96% of young people find a job within six months. But four out of five Italian families do not know the existence of ITS and even 30% of companies do not know what they are. This is bad », underlines Ormes Corradini, president of the ITS Polytechnic School. Yet higher technical institutes represent a key response to tackle the unemployment emergency especially among young Neet and to stem the productivity gap that Italian companies are discounting compared to other European manufacturers such as Germany and France, which churn out post-diploma technical graduates. respectively 800 thousand and 600 thousand a year, against 20 thousand Italians.
The first ad hoc building projects in Emilia to host ITS
The clandestinity of the ITS is also linked to their invisibility: they do not have dedicated offices, “We are on loan in the spaces of schools and technical institutes and we have also grown by 10% in the last year, gathering classrooms here and there, but the cities are gearing up »Explains Corradini, illustrating two projects to create real ITS campuses, one at the provincial station of Modena and one in an area of the former Officine Reggiane in Reggio Emilia. “The ITS must have been close to where research is done”, confirms the Bolognese parliamentarian of the Democratic Party Serse Soverini, signatory of the ITS law, engaged in the process of approving an ad hoc law on ITS, which has already unanimously passed the first step of the vote in the House and is now being examined by the Senate. “The law must try to make the important points of ITS offer explode: their roots in the territory, the ability to respond to the specific demand of businesses by rapidly changing their study paths, thanks to a very strong integration between school and work, which starts during the two years of training and is then confirmed by the data on employability ”, emphasizes Soverini. Which is now working with the Municipality of Bologna to start a new ITS course in cybersecuruty for the training of public employees.
Orientation investments are needed
Every year Emilia-Romagna produces 33-34 thousand graduates and just 2-3% of those who leave high school choose ITS, too few, considering the dropout rates in the first years of university. But the places for super-technicians in the upcoming school year are only 850 in Emilia-Romagna, despite the increase from 27 to 34 courses, and the enrollments already exceed the capacity by 30%. “Rather than changing the ITS acronym, which is not beautiful but is not the real problem, we must work on the reputation and recognisability of ITS courses, which must have autonomous locations, must be made known to students, their families and teachers of the secondary school and must become an alternative of equal dignity to academic courses », emphasizes Giovanni Vesco of the regional school office. Moreover, it is two years of tertiary training almost free (apart from a registration fee of about 200 euros) “with the guarantee of a good job, consistent with the specialization, at the end of the studies: for this reason the Region will further increase financing on ITS and aims to launch a major orientation plan ”, is the commitment of the Emilia-Romagna Economic Development Councilor, Vincenzo Colla.
More women in higher technical paths
One figure is surprising, among those that emerged on the sidelines of the convention of the Associazione Scuola Politecnica in Bologna, and it is 40% of women enrollments in the ITS of the Via Emilia, an unprecedented record, with peaks reaching 60% in institutes. such as the “Tech and Food” for the agri-food district between Parma and Reggio Emilia (but at the ITS Maker, dedicated to mechatronics and automation, the pink quotas do not reach 20%). “Girls are better than male colleagues in Stem scientific and technical disciplines and in digital,” says Councilor Colla. And the president of the Emilia-Romagna ITS Corradini concludes: “We will never be able to respond to the demand for qualified technicians, today at least ten times higher than the supply, which comes from our industrial supply chains if we fail to involve women in this challenge”.