Alessandro Sciullo (p)

Giovanni Castre

The standardized active labor market policies (ALMP) have shown to be not effective in addressing the basic cultural, relational and language skills that are crucial for strengthening the social placement of migrants, a pre-requirement for a successful job seeking. These standardized policies fail in the outcome because they fail in the premises, as they don’t account for the high heterogeneity of migrants background and conditions, and consequently fail in designing and implementing the services. A claim for the provision of more tailored approach in policy design raised in the past decade, with the aim of implementing specialized services able to jointly assess migrants specific needs and valorize their existing competences as a basis to get the provision of targeted training and supporting activities. A relevant role in this process is paid by a proper digitazion and digitalization of the policies at stake. Digitization, that refers to information collection and treatment, should provide the public and private implementers with a proper data management system able to effectively profile the target of the interventions (a pre-requirement for any effective policy design) and to monitor their implementation. Digitalization, that refers to transformation of the processes and services themselves, should enable organizational procedures and practice where an active role has to be played by the migrants themselves, It requires a proper provision of tools (hardware and software) and competencies both for the service providers and the migrants, in order for the process to be properly governed. Digitization and digitalization, that can be conceived as consequent steps of a functional integration of the current labor market policies, can consistently contribute to make these policie more specialized and tailored to the target. This contribution focuses on a few pilot projects developed in Piedmont Region and aimed at experimenting a tailored approach for increasing migrants occupability and more generally to favor their social placement. After a brief description of the projects objectives and main activities, attention is paid to assess, on the hand, the role that the digitization and digitalization played in projects implementation and, on the other, to assess the extent to which and the way through which these digital-shift would need to be fostered. This qualitative assessment takes into account the main criticalities and strengths that might hamper or favor the evolution of ALMP towards a more tailored approach with attention paid to three main aspects: implementation process, the target definition and the outcome evaluation

Giovanni Castre (p), Loris Botto (p)

Recent research shows that, although the EU is now facing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), an increasingly fast process driven by digitalisation, big data and smart devices, within its territory digital skills are by no means distributed evenly. In a world in which two years of pandemic have fostered digital skills demand in numerous occupations, being left behind in the labour market often implies, nay, is the consequence of either lacking those skills or digital access.

This epochal change in the EU is intertwined with another major issue of this century, i.e. one of the greatest immigration waves in its history. The fifth and the sixth EU enlargement, eased new Europeans’ mobility and fostered flows of immigration from Eastern to Western Europe. Moreover, geopolitical turmoil in the MENA region and in Africa prompted an escalation of asylum seekers’ numbers trying to reach the EU. Especially for low skilled migrants, accessing employment and education has always been tough and it became even tougher in a pandemic and hyper-digitalised world.

Migrants find themselves at the crossroads between the aforementioned momentous changes. Besides being the protagonist of migration waves, these people might already have basic digital skills, albeit in most cases either not adequate or not up-to-date. As institutional recognition of migrants' qualifications is a difficult and knotty process, the acquisition of digital skills could be a powerful driver of integration, both socially and economically, from which both host countries and migrants could benefit. Although digital skills are a great opportunity for migrants, their acquisition requires proper tools, training and resources. Oftentimes, solidarity associations (SAs) frame themselves as intermediaries between migrants and the world of labour, striving for enhancing the latter’s digital competences in order to make the 4IR an opportunity for their integration.

In this paper we hence aim to investigate and elucidate how and why digital skills should represent an opportunity for migrants to better integrate and overcome discrimination phenomena that they experience rather than being a further challenge. In particular, we decided to empirically assess with in-depth interviews SAs’ role in strengthening migrants’ digital skills, viz. through what actions they act as a key player in making the 4th industrial revolution an opportunity for migrants' integration. We will also endeavour to discuss SAs’ ability to facilitate their access to digital infrastructures, to increase awareness of digital skills’ benefits, and to integrate them into host countries’ labour market.