ABSTRACT
I n Italy, employment policies have long been inspired by the principle of reinforcing protection for workers rather than of improving their skills. For a long time, investments were more devoted to passive labor market policies, such as unemployment benefits, than to active labor market policies, such as vocational and job training. In Europe, Italy is still one of the countries where spending on vocational training is among the lowest. Traditionally, policymakers in Italy considered job training as a means of combating unemployment and helping disadvantaged groups (the young, people in economically depressed areas, such as the south of Italy), rather than as an investment in human resources and as a way of creating a skilled and productive work force. Only in recent years, have policy actors seen job training as a policy designed to enhance individual competitiveness on the labor market as part of a broader debate on reform of the vocational training system.
