Abstract

During the last twenty years the idea that cultural heritage could be a means of development and employment has been emphasised in the specialized literature as well as in many political agendas, raising expectations which the sector did not concretely come up to. Many important changes took place in the different areas of the cultural sector (heritage, performing arts, cultural industries and media), which in some cases have also determined the increase of the employment total offer; but we have to face the fact that cultural institutions did not deeply change with regard to their organizational status, their ways of selecting personnel and of employing it. The rise of new technologies has affected particularly the cultural industry and the media sector, determining the disappearance of many technical professional profiles of intermediate level and favouring the birth of new service enterprises, which in many cases were founded by specialised professionals already employed by cultural industries. Training institutions have multiplied their offer in terms of courses and diplomas without carefully analysing the real training needs within the cultural sector; the main consequence of this process is the huge disproportion between the number of trained people and the real chances of employment. Culture is widely considered one of the strategic national keys to success in the global market: it is therefore absolutely necessary to promote a serious analysis within this field, in order to plan an adequate use and a better turning to account of human capital for the next twenty years.