ENEL, ITALIAN MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND MINISTRY OF LABOUR PRESENT 2016-2017 WORKPLACE EXPERIENCE PROJECT

  • Hiring begins for 140 students from seven Italian technical schools. The students will alternate school attendance with periods of theoretical and practical training on the job.

 

Rome, September 20th, 2016 – A new work-study apprenticeship program for the 2016-2017 school year was presented this morning at Enel’s headquarters in Rome. It was developed by the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research, the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy and Enel, who signed a Memorandum of Understanding.

The Minister of Labour and Social Policy, Giuliano Poletti, the Under-secretary for the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research,Gabriele Toccafondi, and the CEO of Enel, Francesco Starace, spoke at the event about the new programme, which will involve Enel hiring 140 students in the fourth and fifth years at industrial technical schools in seven Italian regions. 

“This initiative organised by Enel, the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Education, thanks to the synergic application of the measures introduced with the Good Education plan and the Jobs Act, represents a strong model for collaboration between the education system and the world of work to improve the employability of our young people and facilitate their entry in the labour market” said the Minister of Labour and Social Policy, Giuliano Poletti. “Promoting successful initiatives like this one”, he added, “help spread the use of this important tool for the integration of classroom education and workplace experience – the apprenticeship – with which we want to provide our young people with an endowment of skills, experience and knowledge that is every more essential in an economic and productive system in rapid and continuous evolution”.

“With the Enel apprenticeship model, we have an effective demonstration that the Italian approach to the German dual system exists and works”, remarked the Under-secretary for the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research, Gabriele Toccafondi. “In its 2014-2016 edition, this approach led to the company hiring 136 students who received their diplomas this summer. It begins again this year with another 140 apprentices in the fourth and fifth years of secondary school, who will follow the programme for the next two years. As a ministry, we firmly believe in synergy with the world of work, and the results are increasingly evident. Our monitoring, as seen in the test results, has shown that the young people enrolled in the Enel project performed better on average than the others. This means we are not just alternating “training” with the classroom but rather offering an education while gaining experience with the knowledge and skills needed to solve real problems in order to be ready to join the labour market”.

“After the success of the first edition of the project, we are proud to present the new workplace experience programme organized with close cooperation among ministries, educational institutions and the company”, said the Chief Executive Officer of the Enel Group, Francesco Starace. “This approach to entering the workplace offers clear benefits to both actors: for the company, which invests in young people and their education in situation of stable employment that seeks to preserve that investment, and for the students, who thereby have the opportunity to gain knowledge and skills that are more closely tied to technological innovation and the needs of the world of work, all while acquiring their first professional experience. The synergy between the education system institutions and the business world is one of the approaches to inclusive and sustainable development that the Enel Group is promoting as a priority around the world, beginning here in Italy”.

The technical schools involved in the programme are: “Buccari-Marconi” of Cagliari, “E. Scalfaro” of Catanzaro, “Galilei Sani” of Latina, “G.Giorgi” of Milan, “Vittorio Emanuele III” of Palermo, “John F. Kennedy” of Pordenone and “B. Focaccia” of Salerno.

140 students will be hired by the Enel Group with a first-level apprenticeship contract that will be activated with the start of the 2016-2017 school year. At the end of the fifth year of studies, with the conclusion of schooling and graduation, taking account of an assessment of the experience with the company, a second one-year phase of vocational apprenticeship will begin. The duration of the total apprenticeship period will be 36 months.

During the school year, the apprentices will spend one day a week at the company, following a training programme focused primarily on the laboratory and the specific skills required. During the summer, the apprentices work full-time at company to gain direct on-the-job work experience alongside Enel’s operational teams and applying the concepts learned during the school year to the real world, using the safety skills they have acquired.

The first trial work-study apprenticeship programme at Enel was launched in 2014 with seven technical schools (“A. Avogadro” - Turin, “G. Marconi” - Piacenza, “A Pacinotti” - Mestre, “A. Meucci” - Florence, “G. Marconi” - Civitavecchia, “Fermi-Gadda” - Naples and “Giorgi” - Brindisi). The students involved recently passed their final exams with good results and 136 apprentices were deemed qualified by Enel to continue their work experience with Enel.

Based on that experience, considered a success by both the schools and the company, the new programme kicks off today.

The idea to start this experimental project was born from a need to optimise the management of turnover in the company's operational and technical staff by bringing forward the entry of apprentices in the company during their schooling and sharing theoretical materials with the schools that are more closely aligned with industrial requirements, while providing on-the-job experience to complete individual training.

The project was made possible by the legal framework that, with Legislative Decree 81/2015 and the subsequent interministerial Decree of October 12th, 2015, stabilized the workplace experience apprenticeship as an additional way to enter the workplace. The involvement of the trade unions from the outset has also helped to build a set of shared rules to consolidate the programme.

 

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