Abstract

The paper focuses the difficulties that the Italian labour market and the Italian Public Employment Services (PES) are facing in responding to the challenges posed by the Youth Guarantee (YG). The organization of Italian pess risks to absorb yg measures in a complex and inefficient system and, on the other hand, provides a marginal support to a huge audience, in this way jeopardizing the effectiveness of the measures themselves. The paper's argument does not point in the direction of those proposals hinting at the exclusion of pess from the YG management in favour of private operators; it rather highlights the necessity of considerable investments for transforming pess into 'transition management services', in order to face the challenges posed by the yg. It seems that the main challenge/opportunity posed by the introduction of the YG in the Italian case is not as much in promoting the integration of young people in the labour market, as rather in reorganizing pess to make them able, in prospect, to 'support sustainable labour transitions throughout workers'careers'. All the analyzes here provided are based on the survey ISFOL Plus.