Speak about digital skills today is not about talking about new profiles to face the challenges dictated by emerging technologies – prompt engineers for artificial intelligence or data scientists in the big data and cloud fields to name a few – but dealing with a country that on top-level digital skills still have a lot to catch up on.
They were published by State i progress of Italy and European states in terms of digital skills, observed thanks to coordination with all European statistical institutes. Data that, from 2021, the European Commission will include in the report Digital Decade 2030, a program which has the ambition of making Europe grow on the subject of skills but which to date sees Italy in a rearguard position.
Not only because in terms of digital skills Italy is 23rd out of 27 European countries – ahead of only Latvia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania (figure 1) – but because it has fewer ICT graduates than Europe (1.5% compared to 4.5%), it has a marked gap between men and women, it has a very low incidence of ICT graduates on the total employed… and so on.
Let’s start with human capital
If you think that the aim of the program Digital Decade 2030 is to bring 80% of the population between 16 and 74 years of age to have at least basic digital skills by 2030 (in all five domains of the composite indicator Digital Competence Framework 2.0 (i.e. communication and collaboration, information and data literacy, security, problem solving, digital content creation) Italy doesn’t make a good impression.
In our country, the situation is well below the European average: in 2023 only 45.9% of adults have adequate digital skills, over a third (36.1%) have insufficient skills and 5.1% have no skills at all. Which means we are almost 10 percentage points behind the European averagewith values significantly lower than the 27 countries that make up the Union, in all age groups, even if the youngest have greater digital literacy (59.1% between 16 and 24 years old, compared to 19.4% of adults between 65 and 74 years old).
At European level (Eu27)a slight increase in basic skills is measured, overall by 1.6% from 2021, with some states responsible for significant growth (Hungary +10%), others with more moderate growth (Germany +3.3%, Spain +2%), others stable (Italy), others in decline (France -2.3%, Latvia -5.5%, Croatia, Slovakia and Luxembourg -4%).
The indicator highlights the gender disparity in favor of men in almost all European countries (in Italy equal to 3.1 points), with a clear disadvantage starting from the age of 45. Age and level of education remain discriminating factors: in Italy, among graduates 74.1% have at least basic digital skills, almost in line with the European average (5.7% less), while among people with a low educational qualification (middle school diploma) the distance from the EU average is 11 percentage points (22.6% versus 33%).
Occupation
Even though Italy has followed a path of growth reaching the 155 thousand ICT specialists (+19% compared to 2019), its growth remained lower than that of the 27 countries (+24.1%).
There remains a significant gap also between employed Italians compared to the European average (-8%), despite the awareness that digital skills are now required for access to work and for the requalification of profiles.In Italy, in 2023 the unemployed with at least basic digital skills in all five domains are 38.7% compared to the 47.7% of the EU27 average – it needs State -. The value recorded for our country is in line with Germany, but distant from Spain and France by more than 18 percentage points. The diffusion of digital skills is significantly higher among employed people: in Italy, 56.9% reach at least a basic level in the five domains. Even in this case, however, a large gap is observed with the EU27 average (64.7%) and, among the major economies, with France (67.5%) and Spain (75.4%). while Germany shows values slightly higher than the Italian ones”.
In Italy, as in other European countries, the highest share of employees with digital skills is observed in information and communication services and in financial and insurance activities (approximately 80%). This is followed by the real estate sector (76.7%), public administration, defense and compulsory social insurance (71.8%). Industry and commerce are below the European average value, while the lowest values are observed in agriculture, forestry and fishing sector (32.5%) and in the construction sector (43.8%) (figure 2).
Training
Digital training in various sectors in Italia It was paid to staff by 54.7% of companies, compared to 65.3% of European companies.
If you look at the companies with at least 10 employees in 2022, 19.3% provided training activities in this area, a value that has grown significantly compared to 2017 (+6.4%) although lower than the European average (22.4% and with a growth of only +1.7 points) in line with training in companies in France and Spain (figure 4).
In the small companies of our productive fabric, significant use is made of services offered by third party providers who have more targeted specialist skills, such as in the field of cybersecurity (59% of companies did so compared to 68% in Europe) or online commerce (60% in Italy, compared to a European average of 42.9%, 30% in France, 44% in Spain, in Germany 50% %) (figure 3).
Skills and public administration
If we look at the public administrationthe commitment to the skills necessary to launch the modernization and transformation plans of the PA, in its organizational complexity, is confirmed.
The indicators relating to ICT training confirm investments in skills for 23.9% of local public administrations (+7% compared to 2018, equal to 16.9%), for 17.3% of municipalities with up to 5 thousand inhabitants, for 57.6% of municipalities with over 60 thousand inhabitants, for 66.0% of administrations provincial and for 81.8% of the regions and autonomous provinces.
The main topics on which training was carried out in local PAs were those related to applications and software specific (71.4%), to ICT security (49.4%) and to Web (42,2%).
Specifically, 66.4% of local administrations opted for one specific training on the enabling platforms envisaged by the Three-Year ICT Plan (PagoPA, Anpr, etc.), 58.7% on electronic payments, 44.9% on digital identity and 20.2% on cloud computing (figure 5).
ICT profiles in the workplace are growing
The second objective of the program Digital Decade 2030 – to arrive at 20 million ICT specialists and a greater presence of women in this profession – sees Italy contributing today with 970 thousand people employed in occupations that fall within the aggregate of ICT specialists, with the goal of reaching 1.7 million by 2030.
But despite this effort (+19% of ICT employees compared to 2019) the commitment of the other member countries has brought Italy down in the ranking from 17th to 24th position. What emerges is a picture of weakness in the Italian position, even if there are some signs of improvement (figure 7).
The remains low diffusion of ICT specialists in companies with at least 10 employees (13.4% against an EU27 average value of 21.0%), the reduced share of specialists with a degree (Italy is last in the EU, and clearly separated from other countries; in 2023, these were 42.1% against an average level of 66.7%) although Italy and Germany are among the countries where the incidence of specialists with university education has grown the most in the last four years, respectively, by 4.9 and 4.5 percentage points); few ICT specialists under the age of 35, 29.3% compared to 37.3% of the EU27 average; also in this case, Italy is last among the EU27 countries.
In Italy, the share of graduates in ICT disciplines went from 1.3% in 2019 to 1.5% in 2022, at European level from 3.9% to 4.5%. And there remains a modest female presence, in an employment context characterized by a male prevalence (in 2023 women were 15.7%, compared to 19.4% of the EU27 average). and there are still few graduates in ICT disciplines.
“One of the recommendations of the European Commission present in the first report on the Digital Decade is that of increase the share of graduates in scientific disciplinestechnological, engineering and mathematics (Stem). In 2022, according to the Ministry of Education and Research, there were 468 thousand graduates in Italy, of which 288 thousand belong to the Stem disciplines aggregate, equal to 23.4% of the total. The majority of graduates in discipline Stem is concentrated between engineering and architecture (14.2%), followed by subjects in the scientific and mathematical group (3.2%) while just 1.5% graduates in ICT disciplines. The percentage of graduates in STEM disciplines in Italy is slightly lower than the European average (26.5%)”.
Italy, in particular, is in line with the European average as regards graduates in the disciplines of engineering and architecture and in the scientific and mathematical group, while for graduates in ICT disciplines the country ranks at the bottom of the ranking, with a distance from the average of 3 percentage points.
Divari
Finally, the strategic program of European Commission predicts overcoming gender gaps in the use of ICT. In Italy in 2022 only 0.3% of women obtained a degree in this field compared to 1.2% of men. This disparity is also found at European level: 1% of women compared to 3.6% of men.
However, it should be noted that in Italy, as in the other states in the discipline Stem there is a female advantage in our country of 1.3 percentage points. In fact, 4.5% of women resident in Italy have a degree in natural sciences, physics, mathematics, statistics, compared to 3.2% of men.
From the temporal analysis it emerges that since 2019 in Italy there has been a more pronounced increase in graduates compared to the EU27 as a whole (12.4% against 4.7%). This also concerns graduates in STEM disciplines (+7.4% compared to +6.9%) and, in particular, in ICT (+28.8% in Italy, +22.8% in the EU27).
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