ABSTRACT
The issue of professionalism in the Built Heritage Sector opens to reflections on the relationships between the quality of conservation activities and its impacts on local development. The broader framework encompasses both the need of a multidisciplinary toolkit and the long-term approach to preservation activities, i.e. preventive and planned conservation. The process, in turn, is composed by a set of activities, each one requiring special competences/skills and the related professionalism(s). Actually the process includes also the valorisation phase, in an integrated vision. It is also important to highlight that competences and professionals are often differently recognized in the different countries, both from the qualification and the legal point of view: therefore a section of the paper deals more in detail with a case study, which is the authors’ national context. Dealing with profiles, capacities and skills required in the different phases of the process, the reflection moves to the open questions about traditional recognized professions and the skills required nowadays: as may gaps are detected, a new professional frame is needed, as well as new matching profiles and courses in education and lifelong learning.
