Abstract:

The “Higher Technical Institutes” are one of the main channels of the country's vocational tertiary education; in the last decade they have had a relative expansion among young Italians, coming to constitute a resource for the conquest of a decisive aspect of social identity - as a "worker" - in a complex working world.

INDIRE (National Institute of Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research) is the public research body that manages the National Database of ITS (“Higher Technical Institutes”) in Italy, mainly based on quantitative data. In 2017 the Institute carried out a first round of field research, identifying case studies to delve into the ITS phenomenon through a mixed-methods approach, and therefore, also from a qualitative point of view.

The contribution reconstructs the young people’s training experience through the results of both online questionnaires and focus groups, paying attention not merely to the training of skills for work, but also to the orienting dimensions of the ITS model.

The focus of the analysis is on how the various forms of school work integration developed within this training segment represent a contribution to the development of students' competences and what innovative didactic, organizational and social elements implemented by these models are available, in order to counterbalance the mismatch between training and work.

10 Italian ITS, located in different regions and featuring a number of technological specialization areas, were involved in the research. The 10 ITS investigated have been identified according to a reasoned choice sampling, based on some Indire monitoring variables. An online questionnaire with structured and semi-structured answers was supplied to a sample of 161 respondent students. Focus groups were created, with a sub-sample of respondents to the questionnaire: 58 students participating. The areas investigated were: motivations for enrollment and permanence, learning environments for teaching hard skills and soft skills, image of professions and occupations, assessment of the educational path and organizational environment.

The results indicate that key to a more attractiveness of ITS is the experiential education to build not only hard skills, but above all soft skills required by the newer professions. To train these soft skills, ITS appear to be an important resource by virtue of the contamination applied between strategies, teaching skills and learning environments belonging to the world of training and the world of work. The ITS do not only form skills for work, but offer a high socializing function for work, because the students' representation of the "core competencies" (competencies that matter) are shaped according to the soft skills actually required by companies.

Keywords:

Vocational tertiary education, Italy, Experiential Learning, Students, Soft skills.