Once my grandmother, class 1923, commenting on the job of the local car mechanic, told me: “you see my son, there are some trades that are in the dark, and those are the best to have”. What she meant was that while the performance of most of the professionals can be evaluated by most of the customers there are others where you can only trust their instructions and diagnosis. For example, everyone can rate the food made by a professional chef, can judge if the house has been nicely designed by the architect, complain about the details of the hairdresser job or even (!) not be happy with the doctor prescription because, well, a google search said differently, and who doesn’t know his own body right? In other words, my grandmother was appreciating how the mechanic was benefiting from a huge “information asymmetry” in his job, most of the customers can’t understand much about engines and could only trust him, and pay.
In an IT illiterate country,
Italy, IT trades are definitely in the darkness in the above sense; writing a
few lines of simple code or listing some directories using a command line is a sure way to astonish the most who are going to be impressed by the wizardry of such exotic skills.
Despite their rarity and importance
for today economy, Italian IT professionals still don’t get the recognition,
and the salary, they deserve or could have, at least if compared to colleagues in
other European countries or other professions in Italy. A brain drain is
happening of Italians IT professionals who, having the will and the knowledge of
languages (non that common), decide to be expats.
Italy, since middle ages at least, is a corporativist country whit long and well-established professions perfectly
capable to enforce a long list of privileges, as an example right now in certain
regions young lawyers and university professors have been prioritized on the COVID vaccination
list over the elderly and the more vulnerable. As another example Bolt and Uber
are not a thing because of the Taxi leagues.
For the Italian standards, where
you need a bachelor degree and a state exam to be a tourist tour guide, the IT
professionals being the last arrived are not recognized or protected at all and
of course this is well reflected also in the salary level below the one of the
above taxi drivers.
In Italy there are bachelor and Master
degrees in informatics, but they are almost never taught in English resulting
in none international recognition. Other than that we have the usual
international private accreditation, among those the CISCOs are the most looked
for in the job market.
There are only four professional
figure object of government certification: Chief Information Officer (CIO), ICT
Security Manager, ICT Security Specialist, ICT Trainer. Interestingly enough two of those are security focused.
As it often happened in the last years, positive improvements in Italy comes from European Union actions. The “Next Generation EU”
program is delivering a lot of money to countries capable to invest in the IT sector
with a focus on cybersecurity issues and formation, not only business
opportunities but also a new need for standards and recognition may arise from
that.
A long way has to come for the IT
professionals to gain in Italy the social recognition they may deserve
considering the important role they can have to “update” the country and the public
administration in particular; hopefully, my generation will play a role.
Sources:
Competenze
e professionalità nel settore informatico: pubblicata la EN 16234-1 –
Competences and trades in the IT sector
ISTAT – Italian National
Statistics Institute
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