Employability as a policy goal of the dual training system school-work of internship in Italian high schools, with a look at the German model

In this essay we debate on the concept of employability that in the last decade gained momentum as the main framework to define individual behaviour in the labour market relationships. We invite to strenghten the comparison between the italian and the german system of school to work transition as Italy is facing reforms that claim inspiration to the latter. Youth unemployment figures have been high in Italy since the 70s of last century but after 2008 financial crisis have become even more dramatic. Scholars of many Universities, International Think Thanks, as well as national and european institutions are pretty sure that the negative performance of the labour market are linked to low employability of young people. The mainstream prescription to bridge their individual gap is a reform of the Vocational System to strenghten the transition from school to work. In Italy where territorial and institutional conditions face strong territorial divides, in 2015 the Government decided to reform a compulsory vocational system for all the secondary education relying mostly on self commitment of managers and teachers of schools whose resources have been cut over the last ten years. Employability as an individual characteristic stands as a keystone of this process of institutional reform although remains a debated concept and it's highly determined by the institutional background. Vocational System itself is also strongly dependent on its institutional context. We take the case of Germany, were the vocational system showed good performances, to point out that this success story is the result of a strong network of private and public actors that is not likely to be exported in Italy.