The automation firms clustered between Bologna, Modena, and Reggio are not short of demand. They are short of the specific person who goes to a customer's factory, installs a cell, integrates it with what is already there, and stays until it runs. That role has become the constraint on how many systems a company can deliver in a year.
It is a hard job to hire for because it sits between two skill sets. The work requires mechanical and electrical competence and enough software fluency to configure controllers and vision systems, and it requires spending weeks at a time away from home. Graduates with the software half often prefer work that does not involve a factory floor. Technicians with the mechanical half are not always given the training to add the rest.
The firms that have solved it did so by treating commissioning as a career rather than a stage. That means paid time on the software side, a rotation that brings engineers back into design work between installations, and a clear route into project management afterwards. Companies doing this report that they retain people through the fourth and fifth year, which is where the losses used to be.
The regional technical institutes are the other half of the answer, and they are already close to it. The programmes that place students inside firms during the final year have delivery rates that the firms describe as good. What is missing is scale: the number of places is set by how many companies commit to hosting, and hosting a student costs an engineer's time in exactly the period when engineers are scarce.