alpjobs | State of art

Why ALPJOBS?

The project aims at contributing to the initiatives against depopulation in Alpine remote areas. Strong imbalances in terms of job opportunities and services supplied are to be found across the Alpine region.

The effective combination of these three elements has been not systematically explored to teach fitting competences catching up job opportunities provided by  technological and organizational innovations as well as by traditional and future activities. Systemic problems (as well as opportunities) have to be anticipated, identified and managed in advance.

Specific focus needs to be on:

• young (15-34 years), which generally move out of Alpine remote regions for higher education and do not come back to their villages of origin (brain drain);
• counterbalancing this escape by motivating young people to stay or return after studies or training experiences outside the region (brain gain).

The project intend to identify attractive job profiles, which have the potential to induce young people to stay in or to return to Alpine rural areas.
The project focuses on the identification, analysis and mapping of specific activities as well as on the exchange among stakeholders. The identification of job profiles as a contribution to counterbalance depopulation in Alpine rural areas will be carried out through meetings in selected areas and through collection of good practices gathering of information from enterprises, relevant institutions and young adults, where the matching of the labor demand and offer was successfully implemented.

In so doing the project can be seen as innovative pre-mature project responding to the actual needs in the Alpine Region. Due to the restrictions of the ARPAF in terms of timelines and budget and in view of the spatial dimension of the Alpine Region the project can only touch on a very broad and substantial topic, which however tackles a concrete issue. The necessary high flexibility and unconventional thinking of this approach is not reproduced in other funding schemes. The project addresses the ARPAF intervention field “Demographic changes” focused on the target group „youth“. The project has also strong connections to the ARPAF intervention field “Circular economy”. The project results will provide ideas for the implementation of the work plans of EUSALP AG 3, AG 6 and possibly other AGs, such as AG 7.