Conference Program

This paper presents two composite indicators developed within the monitoring and evaluation INAPP programme on the Universal Civic Service (SCU): OKI-INAPP (Individual Employability Index) and ACCI-INAPP (Individual Active Citizenship Composite Indicator). SCU is framed as a policy promoting youth civic engagement and represents, in the Italian context, the first institutional setting to invest explicitly in informal learning outside traditional educational pathways, where young people develop civic, relational and organisational competences through community engagement.

The research programme originates from a question that challenges the dominant paradigm of active labour market policies, which has largely identified training as the main driver of employability while overemphasizing the individual dimension and underestimating contextual factors (Yorke, 2006). Is it plausible that higher employability may also be the product of a more conscious and enacted form of citizenship? Can the competences developed through civic engagement function as autonomous drivers of employability?

The study hypothesises that the dominant paradigm should be enriched by a dimension that has so far remained largely neglected: active citizenship. This dimension cannot be reduced either to technical competences or to traditionally measured soft skills and should not be considered simply additive to employability. Rather, active citizenship is understood as a constitutive component of employability (De Luca et al., 2019, 2021, 2022, 2024, 2026).

OKI-INAPP is a composite index that isolates the individual component of employability across four sub-indexes — education and training, work experience, labour market activation and mobility. This design reflects a precise epistemological choice: separating the individual dimension to make the autonomous weight of contextual conditions. ACCI-INAPP is the individual-level adaptation of the Active Citizenship Composite Indicator developed by CRELL (Hoskins & Mascherini, 2009), reformulated to capture active citizenship as an individual profile across three domains: democratic values, political participation and community life.

The research design adopts a mixed-method approach. A qualitative exploratory phase guided the construction of the indicators, while three CATI sample surveys (approximately 3,500 interviews representative of over 45,000 young people, within a longitudinal design) measured the outcomes of the experience across multiple dimensions — employability, active citizenship, employment status and professional reorientation. The OKI index was validated through statistical matching with administrative data from the Ministry of Labour’s Mandatory Communications database.

The results document democratic effect of SCU participation: employability increases on average by 12% following the experience, across gender, educational level, geographical area and family background. The disappearance of inactive young people and the professional reorientation of almost 20% of volunteers signal activated agency. Controlling for OKI, a young person living in a low-unemployment region has an almost fourfold probability of finding employment compared with a peer in Southern Italy.

The most original finding is that active citizenship exerts an autonomous effect on the probability of labour market entry even when controlling for individual employability (+16% employed among young people with high ACCI). From a capability approach perspective (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011), substantive freedoms should not be considered peripheral variables in the evaluation of youth policies, but rather constitutive dimensions of employability itself.