A new EfVET National Member Sylvia Liuti will represent Italy within EfVET Board

“I am grateful to my colleagues in Italy for having selected me to represent Italy in the EfVET Steering Committee. I am looking forward to contributing with inspiring ideas and good practices, also by enhancing all the highly committed Italian members, so to involve more others in the coming months.”, Sylvia Liuti said after the election as representative of the Italian National Board within EfVET.

Graduated with full marks in Economics from the University of Perugia, in 1989, Sylvia began working early in 1990 for a private training services company, as Project Designer. Although she at that time was more interested in economic studies and analysis, she had the opportunity to be trained at the Business School of Administration of Bocconi University in Milan as a Trainer of Trainers. Thanks to this career path she has discovered more deeply human resource management and adult education and in the meantime how to improve the sector through quality assurance principles and practices. After 6 years of working as an employee she decided it was time for a bigger challenge and in 1997 she decided to step down from that job to start a personal and professional business project: becoming an entrepreneur.

Since then she is still one of the three owners of FORMA.Azione srl, a private company that operates as a consulting company in applying for public funds, mainly addressing the education and training sector as well as being an accredited training centre that specifically accesses ESF funds.

She brought her professional expertise in the Quality Assurance system to the company, since then she has been in charge of both the Accreditation and the ISO 9001 certified Quality Assurance System and the Projects Design.

Her expertise has also grown with a specific work area, focused on gender equality in the labour market, in the workplace and in the education, training and labour market chain, thanks to the Executive Master for ” Gender Equality Experts in Labour Market Policies ”, successfully attended in 2001-2002.

Her entrepreneurial attitude was also enhanced by the acquisition of another VET company (GIOVE Informatica srl), which allowed the founders of FORMA.Azione and all the staff involved, to broaden their horizons towards professions and events of communication, ICT and digital skills.

Since 2009 she is the Director of European projects, first also working as project designer and since 2015 more focused on European networks and strategic cooperation partnerships. Thanks to her commitment and participatory leadership style that motivate the European projects team to compete successfully, mainly on ERASMUS + and REC (Rights, Equality and Citizenship) projects, she now works more as projects coordinator, by supporting other organisations and Institutions in applying for funds and/or willing to lead the project partnerships.

During these many years of activity she has had the opportunity to deepen the following strategic areas of knowledge and work: first of all, Gender Equality, also being assigned as a GE expert in the National Inclusion Group of AIDP (Italian People Management Association); Quality assurance systems, in particular through the European peer review methodology; Validation of non-formal and informal learning – being also professionally certified as a “Validator”; Media and Information Literacy.

She is currently highly committed to contrast sexism, patriarchate, gender discrimination and hate speech, not only in education and the labour market but, in the society at large, since these are mirroring unfortunately, the huge delay that Italy and some other countries in Europe are having, at civic and societal level.

Her vision of the future is based on putting VET, Adult Learning and the Lifelong Learning approach, at the core of the Italian and EU investments, being convinced that Italy should rapidly improve its position in OCSE-PIAAC surveys, by equipping adults and young adults with the right skills to thrive in the next years, completely overcoming the situation that sees Italy as almost the last Country in Europe for Adults’ Literacy.