Conference Program

Can an active citizenship programme — not originally designed to facilitate school-to-work transitions — produce significant effects on young people’s employability? While school-to-work programs (SWP) are increasingly central to educational and labor policy, their evaluations tend to focus primarily on process outcomes and immediate behavioral changes, often overlooking longitudinal results as well as the dimensions of justice, recognition, and voice that define their democratic potential. The case of the Italian Universal Civil Service (SCU) offers key insights that can enrich this analytical framework.

INAPP surveys indicate that volunteers’ employability increases by an average of 12% following their service experience, across gender, educational attainment, geographical area, and family background—suggesting an effect that is widespread and relatively independent of initial conditions. Furthermore, among young people who simultaneously exhibit high levels of both employability and active citizenship, the employment rate reaches 73.7%, compared to an overall average of 57.2%.

These findings stem from a research programme aimed at investigating the extent to which higher employability may reflect a more conscious and practiced form of citizenship, moving beyond the dominant paradigm that identifies education and training as the sole relevant drivers of active labour market policies. Through the use of two original indices — OKI-INAPP for employability and ACCI-INAPP for active citizenship — the research provides evidence that appears to support this hypothesis.

By integrating these findings with the capability approach (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011) and the framework proposed in the volume School-to-Work Programs: an Opportunity for Social Justice?, this paper interprets the SCU as a potential conversion factor capable of transforming institutional resources into substantive freedoms and real opportunities. Although not a transition programme in the strict sense, the SCU produces systemic effects on both the probability of labour market entry and civic agency, proving to be a highly relevant empirical laboratory for questioning dominant evaluative criteria.

From this perspective, the paper raises two main issues. First, it advances the hypothesis that integrating civic and relational dimensions into transition pathways may strengthen employability rather than divert resources from it: if a citizenship programme produces employment as an indirect outcome, policies that ignore this dimension may be based on a partial representation of the phenomenon. Second, it proposes an impact measurement framework based on the OKI and ACCI indices, capable of making visible dimensions — such as active citizenship — that current evaluative approaches tend to overlook. In doing so, it contributes to the development of more comprehensive tools for assessing whether school-to-work programmes truly expand the substantive freedoms and civic agency of participating youth.