The European Pact for Youth, signed by the European Commission, CSR Europe, and a group of enterprises, including Pirelli, to support the development of younger generations through the promotion of training programs, internships and other education efforts.
The European Pact for Youth, of which Pirelli is co-initiator, was signed during the latest Enterprise 2020 Summit held in Brussels in November 2015, open to all business people, educators and trainers interested in initiatives for young people, as well as to all stakeholders committed to supporting its objectives and successes.
By way of this agreement, Pirelli is committed, at various levels, to the education of young people for the period 2015-2017 (along with all of the pact's signatories, the European Commission, business leaders, academia, and the public sector). Specifically, Pirelli will be promoting the pact and supporting the creation of partnerships between the worlds of business and education in order to close the skills gap between nations and cultures, and the company will also be actively involved in the 1st European Enterprise-Education Summit at the end of 2017.
The pact was deemed necessary in light of alarming data on employment for young people. Some 7 million individuals between the ages of 15 and 24 throughout Europe do not work and are not in school, and 4.4 million left school at an early age.
Given these numbers, the European Commission, CSR Europe and an initial group of leading enterprises, including Pirelli, decided to join forces to create a culture of collaboration between enterprise, education and European youth by investing in the talent and creativity of the younger generations through the promotion of education and training as essential tools in developing the skills young people need in today's marketplace.
Pirelli is not new to initiatives of youth education, and the promotion of education and technical training has been a part of the organisation's values throughout its history.
Internationally, the group is involved in technology and research partnerships with various universities, including the Polytechnic Universities of Milan and Turin, the University of Shandong (China) and the University of Craiova (Romania). In Egypt, Pirelli has been involved in a major project with the Al Amreya Industrial Secondary School to teach machinery maintenance to three groups of students and has developed programmes in Turkey in which Pirelli experts volunteer to teach in the country's technical schools and universities. In Yangzhou, China, Pirelli is involved in a programme of internships through which select students from the universities with which Pirelli collaborates in the country participate in on-site training in the areas of product, quality, safety and research. Also in China, Pirelli has signed an agreement with the Qingdao University of Science and Technology to provide 25 scholarships to the best students.
Supporting the development of new skills and the talent of young people to enable them to enter the job market is the goal of the European Pact for Youth drafted by CSR Europe, which, in response to a call by the former president of the Council, had previously launched the European Business Campaign on Skills for Jobs (2013-2017) for the purpose of equipping 5 million young people throughout Europe with the skills needed to deal with the challenges of today's rapidly evolving job market. Following the creation of the campaign promoted by CSR Europe, 42 members of the CSR Europe national business network collaborated on the Enterprise 2020 Manifesto (2015-2020) signed in conjunction with the Milan Expo in June 2015 with the goal of supporting the participation of the 10,000 signatory enterprises through partnerships with academia.
