Abstract

The environment and sustainability have increasingly become a central topic of public and institutional debate. This has led to significant changes in production processes that have transformed the demand for professional profiles and skills. Employers experience the so-called skills mismatch or skills gap, i.e. the discrepancy between the skills required, strongly linked to environmental sustainability and the digital transition, and those offered by workers. Solving this problem means aligning education with labor market needs. Finding ways to incentivize public-private collaboration with the goal of investing in and creating education and training opportunities thus becomes crucial. The complexity of sustainable development calls for new approaches to teaching and training aimed at providing workers with «active skills» enhanced by social learning within a fruitful exchange between educational institutions and local requirements. Adopting sustainability as a value framework for transversal skills and orientation can be essential to determine positive human and social spillovers, helping to achieve the quality education promoted by the 2030 Agenda. The contribution presents some of the projects that promote orientation activities and training for skills improvement implemented by FEEM in the Basilicata Region, which has been experimenting with innovative educational activities for several years