High levels of youth unemployment and a shortage of people with critical job skills are two sides of the same coin: an education to employment path which has stopped working properly since a long time. A sketched analysis of the main pathologies of a 'linear' educational system opens to the needs for new alliances: public-private partnerships devoted to the creation of strong territorial networks, and school-firm partnerships. The core of the paper analyses the three main instruments available for such an alliance - school-job rotation, traineeship and apprenticeship schemes - devoting attention to the ongoing legislative process and to the suggestions deriving from international good practices. The paper ends up stressing four recommendations: from curricula towards competences, how to finance the educational/vocational processes, the needs for strong territorial networks, and the new centrality of the 'instructive' firm. It's a starting answer to the educational failure which implies social disease and shortage of economic growth.