Dalla crisi alla crisi: nuovi lavori e competenze nel settore automotive

With just under a hundred million cars sold, the automotive sector represents one of the main production chains in the world. In recent decades, the market and production have gradually moved from Europe to other areas and, in particular, the Asian countries and China. The crisis of 2008-13 and the emergence of a perhaps unprecedented change in technologies connected to the car (from electric cars to autonomous driving) have helped to reveal the unresolved problems of European manufacturers. In the Italian and international arena, the Emilia-Romagna region has a particular position. Central Emilia, in fact, is at the same time an area in which there is an extraordinary concentration of luxury car manufacturers and in which there is a mechanical industry supplying components to the European area and, especially, to Germany. In relation to this area and this industry, the essay aims to explore a specific aspect: the evolution of the demand for work and, in particular, the demand for skills by manufacturers in the decade 2008-2017. These are years of great transformations. They lie between the two most serious crises that the Italian economy has experienced in the post-war period: between the beginning of the 2008 economic and financial crisis and the appearance of the new collapse of the industry induced by the pandemic. In this decade in the industry many jobs have kept their professional content almost unchanged; others, on the wave of technical progress and digitalization of processes, have changed profoundly; still others have disappeared. The essay is intended to measure these trends.