Want Workers to Reskill? Show Them Who They Can Become

It’s a fork in the road in the game of life: Would you rather train for a new job that might turbocharge your prospects, or stay the course on your existing career path?

As it turns out, many people are rejecting the idea of a fresh start. Work is changing fast, driven by the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence—but many workers aren’t clamoring for the new skills that could help them keep up. In Italy, where public employment agencies offer short, free reskilling classes to equip job seekers for in-demand occupations, so few people have signed up that the government asked Harvard Business School Professor Raffaella Sadun to help figure out why.

Using well-paid, high-demand construction technician and IT support roles as examples, she and her colleagues surveyed about 1,100 unemployed Italian workers to understand what would motivate them to retrain for new roles. She found that for most people, work is tied to identity, not just income, and many don’t want to enter fields that conflict with how they see themselves. Only a third of job seekers were willing to take a reskilling course at all—and some required a stipend to consider a career switch.

“People don't see themselves as a bundle of skills; they see themselves as having a role in society,” says Sadun, the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration. “What I was seeing in Italy is part of a broader phenomenon of low take-up rates for training programs everywhere. How you motivate people to get trained is a real puzzle.”

Sadun’s findings underscore the importance of attaching a mission to labor, as well as matching labor supply with demand as AI eliminates some jobs and creates unmet needs in new areas. To get workers to buy in, explains Sadun, companies don’t just need to pay them more. They need to paint a picture of who they will become after they transition into a new role.

Sadun cowrote the working paper, “Unwilling to Reskill? Experimental Evidence from Real-World Jobseekers,” which was updated in February, with Alexia Delfino, assistant professor at Bocconi University; Andrea Garnero, senior economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); Sergio Inferrera, a doctoral student at Queen Mary University of London; and Marco Leonardi, professor at the University of Milan.

Workers avoid retraining

Italy has been struggling to get workers to engage in short-term training programs for years.

Some 35% of adults are either low in literacy or numerical skills, with shortages especially severe in IT and STEM. Yet by one metric reported in the research, only 7% of low-skilled Italian workers participated in training compared to 18% across OECD averages in 2023. A €4.4 billion (about $5.2 billion today) investment in the labor market in 2021 funded programs to help workers gain new skills, but two years later, only 10% of job seekers started training.

“So many jobs there are open and interesting, with high wages and career opportunities,” Sadun says. But “companies were telling us they couldn't find people.”

The AFOL Metropolitana, the public employment agency network for metropolitan Milan, offers free career guidance, job search assistance, and training. The organization finds that many jobs sit vacant, especially in IT support as firms adopt new technologies, and in construction, where green energy and government-backed infrastructure are driving growth.

Construction is a tough sell

Sadun and her colleagues investigated why workers hesitate to reskill and to find ways to improve uptake, surveying unemployed job seekers in Italy between April and September 2023.

They provided job seekers with reskilling options for high-demand roles as construction technicians or IT assistants, stressing that both were desk jobs that didn’t require manual labor. When presented with the options:

• 38% said they would reskill into IT or construction.

• 36% chose generic “upskilling” training in Microsoft Office to support their current occupations.

• 26% declined any training.

Sadun and fellow researchers found that participants would be willing to pay €3.5 per hour for IT training, but training would need to be subsidized to get them to reskill in construction. The reasons came down to perceptions of status.

Even if participants thought construction would pay better than IT, more money wasn’t enough to make them choose it. Their “perceived identity fit” on a scale of 1 to 10 was higher for IT, at 5, than for construction, at 3.7, indicating that they considered even desk-based construction roles as lower in status.