How can young people meet the challenges of the technology transition? What is success for young people today?
We attended the 2024 Convention of the Young Entrepreneurs of Confartigianato in Rome to tell how we
we try to bring craftsmanship into the new millennium, rethinking products and services from a sustainable and social perspective, valuing new generations and emerging technologies.
Selena Brocca, general manager of Upskill 4.0, spoke on the panel "#Successful #GENERATION: Key Skills for Jobs and Entrepreneurship." She explained how young people can meet the challenges of technology transition in a time of discontinuity and rapid change.
Joining her on stage were Marco Belardi, Consultant of the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy for the Transition Plan, Chairman of the UNI/CT 519 Technical Committee "Enabling Technologies for Industry 4.0," Lecturer of the Transition 5.0 Laboratory and of the Sole 24 Ore ESG Sustainability Master, Matteo Colombo, Director of the ADAPT Foundation, and Erika De Guttry, Italian and International Development Manager LVMH Métiers d'Excellence Department.
We reproduce below the full speech by Selena Brocca at the 2024 Convention of Confartigianato Young Entrepreneurs.
How can young people cope with the challenges associated with transition?
Upskill 4.0 brings craftsmanship into the new millennium, rethinking products and services from a sustainable perspective, having a greater focus on the social and enhancing the potential of new generations and technologies.
The answer to the question of how young people can meet the challenges related to the technology transition is not easy, especially for the historical moment we are living in where the world around us is characterized by discontinuity and big changes happening at great speed. is in the deepest sense of Upskill 4.0, the company I work for and helped start. But before I tell you about it, I'd like to start with the title of our panel, which is generation of success.
What is success for young people today? For our parents, being successful was mainly related to having a good salary so they could buy a house and a car. Today, young people are looking for something more: being successful for young people today (and statistics like the world economic forum's the future of JOBS report says so), is not just about having a good salary: it means doing frontier things, it means feeling part of something that creates a positive impact in society.
And it is precisely by trying to think about how to combine these aspects that we created Upskill 4.0, which is a spin off of Ca' Foscari University and a Benefit company.
We started by trying to combine what can lead young people to success, particularly creating new formats related to TRAINING and INNOVATION.
Regarding education as a university, since 2017 thanks to the Ministry of Education and Merit, we have brought the methodology of design thinking to all ITS foundations in Italy to innovate teaching with the ITS 4.0 project.
On the topic of INNOVATION, on the other hand, we have started working to support companies struggling to address the issues of Industry 4.0 and 5.0, and the topic of sustainability, always involving young university students and ITS.
We work with medium and small enterprises.
With medium-sized enterprises we work in creating new formats that help them experiment with new technologies such as StrAIght to business, a format we created for manufacturing and service enterprises to experiment with generative artificial intelligence.
Instead, with small businesses, we create digital experimentation projects with the support of banking foundations to have entrepreneurs and students collaborate on solving challenges identified together with the business.
Over the past 4 years we have developed more than 100 projects throughout Italy, involving about 400 ITS and university students.
In these last remaining minutes I want to tell you about one that I am particularly fond of and ask the director to send the picture I brought.
In this photo you see Pietro Pietricola, a welder at Officina Dario Pegoretti, and Alessio, anITS Maker student, along with his classmates, observing the process of welding a bicycle frame. Indeed, Pegoretti is a cult brand, known around the world for the quality and care taken in the production of custom-made frames. (BEN HARPER)
The goal of this project was very challenging: to find a way to help the company's future welders learn the secrets of Pegoretti welding in less time but without compromising on product customization. The project resulted in a very original solution: a special welder's helmet that allows an augmented reality visualization that visually guides the welding of bicycle frames. With this solution, maximum craftsmanship is maintained and digital technology is at the service of humans, thus projecting highly crafted production into the future. Here we have a prototype welding mask, thermal and optical sensors for parameter detection, and a smart visual for the welder to visually guide him. Students are protagonists of the future
Going back to the original question, how can young people meet the challenges related to the technology transition? The indications patterns I feel to give are:
- From discipline-based learning to problem-based learning #continuous experimentation
- Moving from the I to the WE: #community
- Shifting from Lecturing to participatory #leadership coaching: companies and trainers get involved
Only in this way can we contribute to the resilience of our manufacturing system, be a positive vector of technological innovation and make a contribution to the growth of society.