Among the transition processes that characterize human life, the shift from university to the work environment is marked as one of the most important. In a period of life defined as emerging adulthood, defined by uncertainty as well as an opportunity for the exploration of identity and the attainment of goals that allow for social recognition (Biasin, 2019; Wood et al., 2018), university students find themselves making important decisions related to personal and professional life plans.

The opportunity of curricular internship for the initial training of future educators and pedagogues gives individuals the exceptional chance to experience and mold themselves as future professionals. As a strategic bridging device between theory and practice, pivotal for the development of competences and skills and essential for the orientation and development of professional identity, the internship assumes a central role in training pathways (Bowen, 2018).

It is for these reasons that in Europe, the internship is considered a strategic tool for the placement of young adults, as well as for the promotion of soft skills that underpin the employability of individuals entering the world of work (Council of the European Union, 2021; Assemblea Generale delle Nazioni Unite, 2015; Santoro, 2015).

In the process of constructing professional identity, understood as a multidimensional construct involving the individual and the context in which one is embedded, the progressive awareness of one's potential and the personal commitment to promoting development in view of a life project are fundamental elements (Pellerey, 2021).

In this paper we intend to bring out several observations related to the process of professional identity construction in the internship context, as well as to consider the construct of self-efficacy in relation to students’ expected competences of the degree courses. Within the framework of a broader mixed method research project (Trinchero & Robasto, 2019), a portion of the data analysis on the proposition of a self-efficacy scale in relation to the internship experience will be introduced.

Through a longitudinal quantitative study proposed to final-year students of the two degree courses in pedagogy it is intended to investigate how the students' perceptions of their own efficacy evolve during the internship. Thus, considering self-efficacy as the conviction that individuals can deal with social or professional situations depending on how they feel about completing the task (Bandura, 2000), the aim of the study is to understand how this perception varies from direct experience.

In addition, it gives prominence to their perception of the importance attached to the competences identified through the learning outcomes of the degree courses, thus contributing to the identification and reflection on latent educational needs. The study is realized in three waves through the administration of a questionnaire comprising three sections (self-efficacy, importance attached and professional identity).

The comparison with everyday educational practices within different kind of services allows students to recognize the competences, skills and knowledge needed to operate within them; therefore, the concept of identity evolves because of personal and social experiences, depending on environmental and interpersonal conditioning that influences its development.

Italian labor market has often shown a certain rigidity about inclusion of young people, difficulties in accessing which are often characterized by precariousness and contractual fragility. Youth employment and the skills necessary to reduce the mismatch between job supply and demand represents a priority for the Italian political agenda, also in relation to the investments included in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. The function of professionalizing training systems takes on a central role providing that these training systems will be able to respond to the need for skills, with a high technological content, expressed by the production systems.

To understand how these training systems are able to meet the demand for professionalism in the territories, it is essential to lead some actions: monitoring the training courses participation, identifying any corrections that should be implemented in terms of young people orientation, to guarantee a better matching between training courses and business needs. These actions should be implemented in order to increase the employment rate of young people with a certification.

The main goal of Inapp surveys, carried out every two years, is assessing the occupablity of VET and IFTS training courses. Moreover the transition to work of former course participants, these surveys allow to analyze many aspects connected to the training experience, such as: the satisfaction of the participants with the training course completed; the role of the training internship; the access mode into the labor market; the matching between the training path and the job found; the most frequent contractual cases and the post-pandemic introduction of new job organization.

The collected data show a good ability of both training systems to get, often in few months, young people into the labor market: about 67% is occupied after a year the IeFP qualification, 71% concerning IeFP graduates and 72% specialized in IFTS courses. Therefore, if work transition is one of the main factors of these training courses, some critical points must be underlined, for example the lack of supply of courses in some Italian regions, the fourth year IeFP is not planned throughout the national territory and IFTS courses are limited in few regions, especially in the North of Italy.

These territorial disparities represent critical issues of the system, which have an impact to potential beneficiaries of the courses, who doesn’t have a training opportunity, and an impact to companies that cannot find specialized personnel.

The aim of the contribution is to illustrate the evidence emerging from field research, underlining the potential and possible lines of development that characterize IeFP and IFTS systems.

The proposal presents the experience of a 'Blended Intensive Programme' (BIP), within the framework of Erasmus +, aimed at promoting the exchange between teachers and students in online and face-to-face learning contexts. The project 'Intercultural and interdisciplinary collaboration for more inclusion', implemented in the academic year 2023/2024, involved students from NTNU/The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, TUB/Technische Universität Berlin and UNIMC/University of Macerata. The BIP programme is the result of the interdisciplinary scientific collaboration of the partner universities, which have planned a didactic-training pathway oriented towards the acquisition of intercultural competencies of educators and teachers, applied from a didactic-relational point of view in school and social contexts. The involvement of two reference teachers from each university started from previous research and co-teaching collaborations, within the individual institutions and in previously co-created projects. This is a meaningful element as having already shared experiences between colleagues allowed for a better definition of the aims of the course designed for bachelor's and master's degree students in education, master's and specialisation courses for teachers and PhDs in education.

The course covered 75 hours of training, from 27 October 2023 to 5 February 2024. The first part was organised in 3 online seminars (co-led by the different universities). Following this, there was a week-long in-presence at NTNU, Norway, in which seminars, visits to cultural centres/schools, workshops using participatory strategies, experimentation with VR technologies, a final conference and various socialising moments were organised. The BIP project ended with an international online conference organised by the students, who dealt with the topics most relevant to them through presentations, group activities and participatory dynamics. During the training course, heterogeneous, highly complex environments were analysed from a theoretical perspective and explored from an experiential and narrative point of view. In addition, also thanks to the collaboration of an Italian educational agency, Cooperativa Lella 2001, already involved in learning and training projects for teachers and educators, attention was paid to the welcoming, learning and inclusion processes of unaccompanied foreign minors and young refugees.

The final evaluation by the organisers, the collection of feedback from the participants and the in-depth analysis with Unimc students through focus groups revealed the high impact significance of the experience. This presentation will propose some interpretative lines of the transition from the inclusive approach to the inclusive impact of the BIP. The first area concerns the inclusive design of the project: the online-presence-online combination made it possible to organise seminars, teamwork, workshops, and social activities offering an Inclusive Learning Environment. Subsequently, the importance of the Inclusion for cooperation approach will be emphasised: the encounter with several communities and collective processes of learning and understanding the "Otherness" made it possible to deepen processes of Learning and Discovering Together. Finally, the last area concerns the importance of knowing how to cross the border: from the content - competencies for teachers and educators in multicultural contexts - to the experience - between personal/professional postures in the group/community, generating Active Reflexivity and Awareness.

Social robots are predictable, emotionally simple, and controllable. For these reasons, they can be employed to assist adolescents in the autism spectrum disorder in learning social, emotional, and imitative skills (Tapus et al., 2007), with the aim of transferring the acquired knowledge to interactions with human partners in real context, such as the school or the work environment.

This contribution aims to present part of a research project funded by the FIA-ONLUS Association that is currently being carried out at the University of Genoa. The objective is to test how the use of a social robot can help enhance the communication and relational skills necessary for students with autism in secondary education to enter the job market (from the ability to adequately support a job interview, to the capacity to interact with appropriate relational modalities with potential employers and colleagues). Studies in the field (e.g., Tapus et al., 2012) have shown how a social robot can more easily, compared to a human interlocutor, open a communicative channel with individuals with autism, acting as a mediator within a social situation.

The chosen social robot is Nao, which has been largely used with people with autism, showing benefits in terms of interaction, social and emotional skills (Shamsuddin et al., 2012; Tapus et al., 2012; Miskam et al., 2013; Cao et al., 2020).

To facilitate the generalization of skills learned in interaction with the robot, our experimental design also includes the use of virtual environments where learners can practice the skills learned in an initial social context before ultimately applying them in a real-life setting.

A preliminary phase introduces participants to the upcoming robot-assisted program in their usual learning environment with their therapist and educator. Subsequent phases are organized into short sessions where the robot asks the participant questions about various social interaction scenarios and suggests appropriate responses. In presenting different social scenarios (for example, how to introduce oneself to an employer? How to present one's skills?), we will use the guiding principles of social stories (Gray, 2021), short narratives that help understand how to behave appropriately in various social situations.

After the in-person activities with the robot, we will transition to the use of virtual environments. In these environments, diverse “virtual” relational situations will be designed and implemented (interviews for working in a library; interviews for working in a supermarket, etc.). A final phase replicates the previous ones in the participants’ school environment. The learning path begins with only one peer, and continue by involving two, then three, then four peers. The work, in rotation, will engage all classmates.

This framework, piloted in Pennazio et al. (2020) and currently under extensive testing, seems to be effective in developing communicative and social competences. By honing these skills, adolescents with autism can gain confidence and better navigate social scenarios (both real and virtual), ultimately contributing to their success in various aspects of life, including employment opportunities.

The meaning of work has changed over the centuries, shifting from a normal daily activity in the pre-industrial era (Polanyi, 1947) to the expression of self-fulfilment and skills deployment in the second part of the 20^th Century (Méda and Vendramin, 2017). Universities were consequently asked to contribute to society's growth and well-being through Third Mission activities and by preparing employable graduates (Hillage and Pollard, 1998; Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Tomlinson and Holmes, 2017). Universities then increased relations with external players, arranged new support services, e.g. career services (Kretovicks et al., 1999), and revised curricula and teaching and learning (Pegg et al., 2012) to support the acquisition of employability skills. Transversal and soft skills are considered enablers of the "employable individual" to access, stay, and re-enter the world of work in a continuous life design process (Savickas, 2012). Experiential learning is thought as effective for developing generic skills in higher education (David, 2008; Mergendoller et al., 2006). Additionally, work-based learning experiences could serve students' professionalisation needs and the university's needs to strengthen the links between academia and its region (Healey, 2005; Cyert and Goodman, 1997). Globalisation and digitalisation also pushed universities toward significant changes. In this rapidly evolving scenario, there was the 2020 Covid-19 shock. Concerning pedagogies for employability, the most remarkable impact was on work-based learning. Involved players were not prepared for online internships previously limited to specific fields (Ruggiero and Bohem, 2016). New forms of work-based learning and new career development skills (e.g., online interviews) were suddenly essential.

Just after the pandemic, against the narrative of "normality", it became clear that structural changes had happened in the work environment. In 2022, Eurostat statistics reported an increase in the share of workers from home (8% on average; peak 33% in Sweden). The Eurofund (2021) noted there will be "no looking back" about telework. Also, phenomena such as the Great Resignation, emerging attitudes such as the Quite Quitting, and the spread of the YOLO (You live only once) economy showed a rising evolution of the social conception of work – and possibly a revolution of the meaning of work. Narratives still look at work as a crucial identity component: debates revolve around the potential validity of working from home, and focus on innovative companies and start-ups. Concurrently, a new generation of graduates is entering the labour market, and their attitude towards work does not necessarily align with this widespread narrative.

This work presents the results of an exploratory survey carried out at the University of Macerata in June 2023, addressed to students enrolled at the university (across all departments). The survey was formulated to better understand students' needs for career development, following the decreasing participation in typical career development events (e.g., career workshops, CV drafting courses, etc.) and lowered interest in online internships. Explored dimensions included expectations for future jobs, interest in topics related to the work environment, and the preferred geographical location for working life.