“Shortage of Skilled Workers in Bergamo: Welders, Turners and Millers in High Demand”

The shortage of skilled workers in the Bergamo area is so deep-rooted that it is no longer a novelty, yet there are certain professions even classified as “untraceable” among the profiles of the employment agencies. These are welders, turners and millers, figures so sought after that professional courses, while training about fifty a year, do not meet the needs of companies which are at least 200 a year.

The latest official data available were released by the Iziwork employment agency, present in Bergamo since 2021 with a “hub” and, precisely with respect to the most requested professional figures in the province, has provided some significant numbers. On our territory, agency work is growing in manufacturing and in the rubber and plastic industry, with particular reference to the “Rubber valley”, the district located between Bergamo and Brescia, which has about 300 companies and over 3,000 employees. Followed by mechanics, electronics and electrical engineering. The most requested workers are general workers (30%), metalworkers (20%), molding workers (25%), forklift drivers (10%) and sorters (15%), while some professional figures are defined as unobtainable, and it deals with millers, toolmakers, printers and operators of cnc machines, i.e. numerical control machines.

«They are figures who carry out complex processes, which are the basis of Bergamo mechanics“, explains John Grazioli, owner of Grazioli Angelo & Fratelli in Fara Gera d’Adda and president of the Enfapi training center in Treviglio. It is he who explains that today the milling cutter is an increasingly fluid professional figure, often overlapping with that of the toolmaker or turner, dedicated to complex steel workings that have a myriad of possible applications: moulds, components for automotive or aerospace, medical parts and so much more. «In my company we have an average of four interviews a week, while in the two courses of technical operators that we hold in Treviglio, we train about 50 young people a year, but sometimes the companies are in such difficulty that they would like to hire them even before the end of the training», says Grazioli, measuring the pulse of a professional figure for whom, without exaggerating, the Bergamo area is trying to avoid extinction. It is always the entrepreneur who tells us how this situation came about: «It is an endemic shortage that arose in the late 1990s with the escape from technical schools and, if you like, justified or in any case encouraged by the crisis in the industrial sectors of 2006 and 2008 which led to a reduction in the demand for manpower in mechanical enterprises. Then, in 2011 and 2012, with the start of the recovery, the training hole was now evident and when needed they were no longer to be found».

He is also convinced that the birth of the problem must be sought far away Luca Nieri, general secretary of the Fim-Cisl of Bergamo, a trade union that monitors the phenomenon also through the Ial, its own center for continuing education. «There is certainly a cultural question of families who prefer to have their son an engineer rather than a worker, there is a problem of school preparation and lack of continuous training for a figure who is no longer the one he was 30 years ago and there is a problem of telling these professional figures that we call skilled workers, but who are increasingly similar to engineers». On the contrary “in large companies these are roles filled by engineers». For this reason, more and more industrial realities are broadening their gaze, going to train forty-year-olds, as well as young people and, Nieri underlines, “foreigners too”. Today, in fact, “most of the welders come from other countries and the prospect is that more and more of these job opportunities will go to those who know how to seize them even from outside Italy”.