The Italian State is offering workers in companies that are closing a pathway to find employment.

The measure implements the recommendation of the European Commission, which among the conditions for granting National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRPr) funds, requested Italy to offer more support for employment transitions, with personalised measures, counselling services, guidance, and skills assessment.

This is also the result of an intensive conversation between Italian Outplacement Association (AISO) and the group leaders of the Chamber and Senate work commission. The discussion, carried out by Cetti Galante, INTOO CEO and Institutional Relationship AISO Delegate, and Cristiano Pechy, LHH CEO and AISO President, was focused on the added value that outplacement brings to the system of active policies, especially for people far from the labour market.

Cristiano Pechy commented that this is "A first, small result, which I hope will be the stimulus to start that overall intervention on active labour policies that we have been waiting for decades and that would allow us to have a more efficient but also fairer and more inclusive labour market. An investment like this could have a 10-fold greater impact if it were part of a more harmonious project".

Today, he added, there is a need to "move" people from a company in crisis to one that needs staff. Outplacement is about understanding what the demand for labour is and creating training paths for relocation, doing a skills analysis to understand in which sectors the worker can be useful. In Europe there are several countries, such as France, Spain, and Finland, which have made outplacement compulsory in case of company reorganisations. In France, for example, the job centre holds the governance and, when there is a need for restructuring, it contracts the service to a private employment agency for outplacement. In Spain, outplacement is compulsory for all reorganisations affecting more than 50 people and is also offered to workers on the verge of retirement. In other countries, such as Germany, the Netherlands and England, it is not compulsory, but companies offer it.

“There is no tool that is more topical than outplacement”, he concluded.

Senator Nunzia Catalfo, commenting the new provision, said: “After the New Skills Fund, which I set up last year as Minister of Labour and which has enabled tens of tens of thousands of workers to increase their potential, we are now putting another step to accompany them in the process of ecological and digital transformation in the labour market and accelerated by the pandemic. More than ever, we need to focus on training and retraining and make good use of European resources to strengthen active policies".