MAF, the forum for millennials
Top business leaders and young hopefuls high-fived at the recent Millennials Ambassadors Forum (MAF) at the Nuvola Lavazza in Turin on 7 November. The HRC Network’s new Europe-wide platform brought the digital generation together with corporate movers and shakers to help come up with concrete answers to issues relating to various businesses.
Aside from supporting the initiative inspired by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals outlined in the UN 2030Agenda, our Group played its part by detailing the opportunities for professional growth we offer to millennials and through a call for ideas concerning electric mobility launched by our CEO Francesco Starace. The event format saw all the ambassadors present their businesses while the millennials were also given a problem to solve. Tight timescales and concrete proposals for a generation that digitalisation has made incredibly fast on every level. The call for ideas will be available from Enel’s OpenInnovability website from 21 November.
The top managers also had short five-minute face-to-face meetings with some of the millennials during the session developed by Seeds&Chips called “Give me 5”, an event that concluded with high-fives all round.
Our CEO Francesco Starace declared that we are going through an epoch-changing transition because new technologies are changing corporate mind-sets and business models. One of the most deeply affected sectors right now is energy, which is now able to offer new possibilities thanks to digitalisation.
One such choice is electric mobility and our CEO gave the young participants a problem to solve to help encourage the use of electric vehicles: how can we prevent non-electric vehicles from parking in e-vehicle charging bays?
Generational face-to-face
The Turin MAF #IdeasWork is the brainchild of Luisa Todini, President of Todini Finanziaria, Roberto Maroni, President of Fondazione Root Millennials, and Giordano Fatali, President and founder of the HRC Group. It centres around reverse mentoring, which brings two very different generations – the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1965) and the millennials (born between 1981 and 1995) – together to exchange knowledge and skills in order to inspire innovative projects. On the one hand are CEOs, top managers and representatives of Italian and foreign institutions with extensive professional experience but less practical familiarity with technology than their younger counterparts. On the other side are young people that have acquired digital skills naturally as they grew up but who find themselves disorientated within a rapidly changing employment scenario. Successful startuppers were also involved in workshops on subjects of the likes of Blockchain, the circular economy, job search strategies and reverse mentoring. The Millennials Corner too was a special space set aside for information stands and for candidates to make contact with businesses and also to present their CVs.
Turin also provided the venue for the launch of Millennials Ambassadors Outlook 2019, a survey of today’s working world and the markers of the digital generation carried out with input from internationally-renowned influencers. The results reveal a generation that is a complete departure from those that went before it. There are now 8,658,000 digital natives in Italy. However, when it comes to employment, their sense of belonging to their nation of origin is much more fluid than in the past. Millennials see themselves as citizens of the world and have a strong propensity for networking and, therefore, a determination to overcome barriers and borders. Despite the focus on training and education, which are deemed essential to employment choices, youth unemployment levels in Italy remain very high at around 35% of the total. Work is about more than just economics to millennials – it is a means of self-actualisation, a way of expressing their potential and, most importantly of all, of making a practical contribution to improving the world they live in.
This point was reiterated on several occasions by the MAF speakers, who included Marco Bussetti (Minister for Education, Universities and Research), Lorenzo Fontana (Minister for the Family and Disability) and Chiara Appendino (Mayor of Turin).