Chapter The top candidate is an intermediate one: An analysis of online posts of Veneto industries

The paper describes the results of an experimental study carried out by sending bogus CVs in response to online posts. To each post related to a job vacation in a Veneto industry a number of five CVs was created and sent. The CVs were created so to experimentally evaluate the likelihood of discrimination against certain categories of candidates. The variability of call back rates of the addressed industries was analysed to elicit possible relationships between recruiters’ taste and gender, nationality, academic curriculum and other social characteristics of applicants. Contrary to expectations, women obtained more call backs than male counterparts and graduates in a social or humanistic discipline were called back more than graduates in a scientific or technical one. Even the possession of a car was negatively evaluated by recruiters. As expected, instead, foreign-born candidates obtained far less call backs than Italian ones. A multivariate analysis drew us to the conclusion that the largest part of online posts was destined to candidates who belonged to intermediate categories, that is, to candidates being the best once the bottom and the top candidates were skimmed. The worst candidates were excluded for intuitive reasons, while the excellent ones – we conjecture – were left aside because recruiters guessed they would demand more than companies were available to give. These outcomes could help graduates in their duty of preparing an ad hoc CV

Chapter Mapping and factoring the 2007 ATECO categories in regard to specialised human capital

The paper describes an exercise of classification of a subset of five-digit categories of the 2007 ATECO classification system of economic activities. The analysis is grounded on the hypothesis that economic sectors can be clustered according to the competency level required to human resources recently working in industries or services in Italy. The analysis may be useful to evaluate a possible relationship between economic development and education. The analysis consisted of a mapping and then a clustering of the Ateco categories according to the between-distribution dissimilarity of any possible couple of categories. The basic idea was to highlight the Ateco categories that require either more education than others or more education and working experience (human capital) than others, pinpointing, in particular, the categories that require larger percentages of tertiary education and those residing close to territorial hubs. The competency level was measured with a combination of educational attainment and in-service experience of Italian employees, as defined by Istat, the Italian statistical institute. The employees’ educational level was evaluated with the frequency distribution of five (ordinal) classes of education of people employed in 2018 and 2019 in both private and public establishments and offices; the working experience with a logarithmic transform of the average number of in-service years of employees. The analysis highlighted both a sort of input-related classification of the economy and a supply-side classification of the labour market. The results are in line with the theory of the existence of a cluster of creative companies residing close to territorial hubs

Chapter Wine preferences based on intrinsic attributes: A tasting experiment in Alto Adige/Südtirol province

Different methods have been developed by researchers in modelling wine consumers purchase behaviour. The quality of a food product is described by a set of characteristics ascribable to the intrinsic and extrinsic product attributes (Olson and Jacoby, 1972). Price, brand, region of origin, grapes and gained awards are the key extrinsic attributes and physical characteristics of the wine such as taste and flavour are intrinsic attributes. This paper addresses the problem of measuring the intrinsic attributes that characterise the wine, based on specific characteristics and the impact on consumers in terms of preferences. To this end, a fractional factorial experiment held on a selection of white wines of the Alto Adige/Südtirol province in Italy. The sensorial experiment involved a voluntary sample of 33 mild wine consumers and concerned 6 grape varieties typical of that territory. For each variety, two producing cellars were selected for a total of 12 evaluated wines. The experiment followed a double-blind administration procedure to the sample and a paper questionnaire was used to elicit the consumers’ opinions on the tasted wines. The results show that intrinsic attributes, such as taste-olfactory intensity, harmony and olfactory complexity, are the drivers used in combination by consumers to rank wines in order of preference

Chapter Experience, sensorial skills and personality qualifying a wine consumer as an expert

This paper analyses the characteristics of wine consumers that may qualify them as wine experts. The wine evaluation expertise of consumers, as measured by various degrees of self-perceived ability, is hypothesised to causally depend on cognitive and non-cognitive characteristics of wine experience, on sensorial skills relevant for wine assessment and on wine consumption-related personality aspects. Our work consisted in measuring and analysing the relationships between the self-assessment of the ability to wine assessment given by a convenience sample of consumers and the qualification of their consumption experience and training (ranging from “simple” consumer to producer/seller to professional sommeliers), their sensorial (olfactory, flavour) skills and enogastronomic culture. Wine culture is defined as the capacity to harmonise wine and food and conceive wine as a nutritional, social and health-related means. The analysed data refer to a tasting experiment held as a social activity during a scientific meeting in Pescara, Italy, in 2018. The sample of wine assessors who filled in the evaluation questionnaire included both meeting participants and people belonging to AIS-Abruzzo, the regional association of chartered sommeliers. The data collected at wine tasters showed that there were strong relationships between the self-evaluation as wine expert and the consumption experience, the assessment skills, and the wine consumption “culture”. The relationships differed according to age, activity and length of wine consumption experience of the assessors

Chapter Does an entrepreneurial spirit animate fresh graduates in their work-seeking during uncertain times?

The labour market is becoming harder and harder even for graduates. The economic difficulties added by Covid-19 restrictions worsened the graduates’ employability. In our opinion, public authorities should intervene to soften the school-to-work transition and graduates should become more entrepreneurial to overcome own market difficulties. We realised a survey on graduates from Padua University, the largest university in the Veneto region, Italy. In this survey, among other things, the entrepreneurial spirit of graduates was investigated. This spirit is intended as both the propensity to undertake an own business and the skill to find own ways and resources to overcome the possible difficulties while searching for a job either as employee or self-employed. It emerged that the propensity to start an own business concerns only a bunch of fresh graduates and that the capacity to implement personality resources is large among young people but remains unexplored because of cultural and contingent reasons

Chapter Measuring the movement between employment and self-employment: a survey proposal

The study concerns the following issues: 1) basic definitions (traditional craftsmanship and commercial work, self-employment, freelance jobs, learned professions, etc.); 2) analysis of the sources on, and the organizations representing the workers of the self-employment compound; 3) medium-to-long term analysis of the main components of the self-employment compound and of the occupation in self-employment companies. We examined various statistical sources on self-employment in Italy, a category including about 5.5 million workers, according to official estimates. We examined the yearly data of the time span from 2009 to 2019, with a concept about 2020, the Covid-19 year. In the examined period, we highlighted a dramatic reduction at employment entry of younger cohorts of less educated people (about one million people), just partly compensated by an increase of new entries of aged and highly educated people. The study concludes with a proposal of a set of questions on self-employment that could be used to adjust the specific part of the questionnaire used by Istat for the survey on the Italian labour forces

Beyond Employment Rate: A Multidimensional Indicator of Higher Education Effectiveness

This paper proposes a multidimensional indicator of higher education effectiveness that aims at going beyond the limits of measuring university effectiveness merely through employment rates. The units of analysis are the study programmes. Eleven indicators related to external effectiveness are selected, and their reliability for and relevance to the representation of the concept of effectiveness are empirically evaluated. The data are drawn from a longitudinal survey administered to graduates of the University of Padua, Italy, from 2008 to 2011. From our analyses, effectiveness appears to be a multidimensional concept composed by professional empowerment, employability and personal fulfilment. The right time for collecting relevant data on educational outcomes varies according to the types of indicators: indicators of professional empowerment assessed 1 year after graduation are most suitable, while for personal fulfilment measurement both short- and long-term evaluation are relevant, and, for employability, data collected 3 years after graduation cannot discriminate among study programmes.This paper proposes a multidimensional indicator of higher education effectiveness that aims at going beyond the limits of measuring university effectiveness merely through employment rates. The units of analysis are the study programmes. Eleven indicators related to external effectiveness are selected, and their reliability for and relevance to the representation of the concept of effectiveness are empirically evaluated. The data are drawn from a longitudinal survey administered to graduates of the University of Padua, Italy, from 2008 to 2011. From our analyses, effectiveness appears to be a multidimensional concept composed by professional empowerment, employability and personal fulfilment. The right time for collecting relevant data on educational outcomes varies according to the types of indicators: indicators of professional empowerment assessed 1 year after graduation are most suitable, while for personal fulfilment measurement both short- and long-term evaluation are relevant, and, for employability, data collected 3 years after graduation cannot discriminate among study programmes

Ranking services for students via preference elicitation at Padua university

The University of Padua conducted a survey to elicit the preferences of its students for new services that the university, the city and local authorities could offer to improve student life before, during and after graduation. In this paper, we present the statistical methodology for ranking services according to students’ preferences and discuss the resulting ranks of the services grouped in 10 thematic areas. We conclude that the preference elicitation method and the rank estimation method adopted in our research are appropriate for within-university prioritisation of student services

Job-major match and job satisfaction in Italy.

Purpose: This paper aims at studying how graduates\u2019 jobs may be determined by their educational performances and social background. In particular, we investigate job-education mismatch and job satisfaction to evaluate whether time spent and effort exerted during university studies were compensated with a good job. Approach: Data on the occupational status of the graduates 36 months after graduation, collected by the Padua University on its graduates, are analysed by means of univariate and multivariate methodologies. In particular, the pathways from graduates\u2019 social capital to job satisfaction are investigated through a Structural Equation Modelling approach. Findings: We find that a minority of graduates can be considered as overeducated when considering the requirements of the labour market, but many graduates state that any degree would suffice for their job. Multivariate analyses show that graduates\u2019 job quality is related to their university choice and outcome, high school choice and performance, social capital. Destiny is written from the beginning of the educational pathway, but students can affect their labour market future with an appropriate choice of university programme. Originality: The qualified point of this paper lies on the complexity of the model adopted for the analysis and its ability to highlight direct and indirect effects: two job outcomes (job-major match and job satisfaction) are the variables of interest, analysed within a structural model covering all educational stages of the Italian educational pathway, from parental social background to University degree

Chapter Measuring content validity of academic psychological capital and locus of control in fresh graduates

Positive psychological capital (PsyCap; hope, resilience, self-efficacy, and optimism) and locus of control (LoC; internal and external) denote psychological dimensions which have been identified as crucial resources for occupational satisfaction and success. These dimensions could impact fresh graduates’ ability to stand the labour market in times of crisis. Two instruments, called Academic PsyCap and Academic LoC, have been specifically developed to evaluate these dimensions among fresh graduates. The two instruments consist of 34 and 10 items respectively, which have been selected, through factor analyses, from a large initial pool of items administered to fresh graduated at the University of Padova. Results suggested adequate psychometric properties for both Academic PsyCap and Academic LoC. The factor structure of the two instruments was confirmed (CFI = .92, RMSEA = .07, SRMR = .07 for Academic PsyCap; CFI = .96, RMSEA = .05, SRMR = .05 for Academic LoC), and internal consistency was satisfactory for all the subscales. The two instruments are presented, and their psychometric properties are described