Abstract

The gap among professional competences and global market needs is rooted in an ever changing market scenario and requires an organized and intentional continuous training. In the last thirty years this fundamental assumption grounded the success of the lifelong learning paradigm and spread the importance of education in relation to the national economic competitiveness. At the same time, a reductivist and linear epistemology promoted a dominant narrative based on the idea of ‘matching’ and adaptation, channelling the representation of a subcontracting relationship among educational system and economic domain. In this framework the general desire to attain ‘better skills, better jobs, better lives’ entails the risk of designing and managing instructional learning contexts aimed at acquiring skills and competences already defined by market needs. The article will propose some considerations on these aspects focusing on the changing role of doctoral training along the lifelong learning system. PhD holders are continuously facing professional transitions towards non-academic contexts and this fact interrogate their training models and, specifically, the ways through which university is fostering a generative dialogue with external social actors.