(Dis)Trust of Displaced Workers - The Experience of 'Quic Project' in Italian Public Retraining Programs

Every training process aims to a deep transformation of individual competencies. The success of these programs strongly depends on the level of commitment of the actors involved playing different roles (Public Government, financing body, providers, trainers, firms, workers) and mainly on the presence of a crucial aspect: trust. Trust favors the willingness to cooperate, to change and to risk, so to run virtuous training processes. This concern is very important in low trust-based contexts as the professional training programmes for long-term unemployed workers re-skilling implemented by the Italian Regions and especially by those of the Southern. In fact, they usually have a bad reputation, because (for reasons beyond the scope of this research) they contributed to a gradual trust destruction between all the parties involved, first of all the unemployed workers. In these contexts, the (almost) total lack of mutual trust between the actors involved (Region, training provider, trainers, unemployed workers and enterprises) is an insurmountable obstacle to start virtuous training processes. The present paper intends to describe the 'Quic project' (funded by Campania Region, Southern Italy, in 2009) started to test out if there is place to build training paths according win-win logics, with no losers and where all the parties involved can profit. According to this assumption the 'Quic project' focuses on planning high quality training project, giving much attention to trust-related problems. Therefore, the 'Quic project' believes very important to develop a study on trust building, together with the training providing, to better the reputation of this type of training processes. According to such idea we assume that unemployed workers training programmes could be a very 'productive' context where understand if and how it is possible to undertake a trust-based (re)building and maintenance process