“Thanks to its mission to create long-term value through a sustainable, shared model, Enel is now a company in which millennials can follow a pathway of both professional and personal growth”
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).
