Public Administration Training: in recent years, training for public-sector employees has taken on a new dimension. Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) has placed human capital development at the heart of public administration reform policies, providing resources, objectives, infrastructure and tools to support investment on a national scale. The conclusion of the NRRP phase now makes it possible to look at this experience from a broader perspective. Alongside the quantitative and qualitative results achieved, a body of knowledge has emerged concerning how training is planned, undertaken, applied at work and transformed into organizational capacity.
This trajectory began well before the NRRP. As early as April 24, 1995, Circular No. 14 issued by the Minister for the Public Service, addressing training for public administration employees, linked professional development to innovation processes and assigned the Department of Public Administration a role in providing strategic direction and coordination. The instruments envisaged included monitoring training needs, building information bases, establishing links with universities and maintaining regular dialogue among human resources managers. The Directive of December 13, 2001, strengthened this approach by embedding systematic and continuous training in public administrations’ planning processes and linking its value to individuals, organizations and, ultimately, the quality of services as perceived by citizens.
The subsequent trajectory was more uneven. The 2026 Report of the Department of Public Administration describes a prolonged period of declining investment. Training expenditure fell from approximately €309 million in 2010 to €159 million in 2021. In 2021, participation averaged around 0.9 training days per employee, following 0.4 days in 2020. In that same year, 2020, only 46.7% of administrations had organized training activities, and just 13.8% had a training plan. These figures also reflect the weakening of essential organizational capabilities needed to assess training needs, plan interventions, select methodologies and providers, support learning and evaluate results.[1]
Overall, the trajectory of public-sector training is more complex than a simple shortage of training provision. Italian public administration had developed a strategic vision of training long ago, while its ability to translate that vision into widespread, stable practices supported by adequate resources had followed a far less linear path. The NRRP intervened in this trajectory by rebuilding the conditions for investment in training on a systemic scale. The experience gained now makes it possible to focus on the processes through which individual learning can become organizational capacity and, through data, evaluation and shared knowledge, contribute to improving public policies.
Public Administration Training: The NRRP and the Leap in Scale
Mission 1 of the NRRP placed the development of public-sector employees’ skills within the broader framework of strengthening administrative capacity. Under Investment 2.3, “Skills and Administrative Capacity,” Sub-investment 2.3.1, “Investment in Education and Training,” sought to strengthen and expand public employees’ knowledge and skills through an integrated human capital development strategy based on upskilling and reskilling.
To implement this initiative, the Department of Public Administration designed and delivered the project “Investment in Education and Training: Services and Technological Solutions to Support Human Capital Development in Public Administrations,” structured around a coordinated set of actions. Large-scale self-paced online training was complemented by advanced training programmes, initiatives addressing the specialist needs of public administrations, agreements with the university system, and the expansion of provision by the National School of Administration, including through the establishment of regional training hubs, and by Formez PA. Communities of practice for human resources and training managers were also developed. In this way, the strategy addressed both the demand for and the supply of training, expanding access and diversifying the instruments available.
“Syllabus: New Skills for Public Administrations” was one of the main infrastructures supporting this strategy. Developed by the Department of Public Administration as a national hub for the development of transversal skills among public-sector employees, the platform connects public administrations, employees and the organizations contributing to training provision.
As of August 31, 2026, more than 8,000 public administrations were registered on the platform, representing over 68% of the total number of administrations considered in the ISTAT census used for monitoring purposes. The registered central government administrations numbered 91, with more than 2,000 associated regional and local offices and other peripheral units. More than 1,200,000 employees had been enabled to access the platform, over 800,000 had registered, and more than 655,000 had started at least one training activity. The catalogue included 166 courses, providing a total of 421 hours of training across the areas of administrative transition, digital and ecological transition, leadership and soft skills, the principles and values of public service, and languages.
The NRRP target illustrates the scale achieved. By the same date, 486,761 individual public employees had completed at least one course qualifying towards the target, equivalent to 110.19% of the planned objective. During the same period, the platform had issued more than 3.2 million certificates of participation. These figures demonstrate the scale reached by public-sector training in Italy.
The original concept of Syllabus encompassed a broader function than simply delivering training. From the outset, the platform was designed as a shared learning hub for public administrations and other implementing bodies, as well as an information system for training. One of its fundamental purposes was to build a large, shared knowledge base to help design and monitor training policies and the public sector’s human capital skills system over time, supporting data-driven training policies. The platform was therefore conceived with two complementary purposes: training and knowledge generation.
These two functions, as a learning hub and as a training information system, guided the platform’s design and development from the beginning. In the early stages of implementation, efforts focused primarily on the learning hub function, because developing the course offering, enabling access for administrations and employees, ensuring infrastructure reliability and meeting the targets required a particularly substantial commitment.
At the same time, the platform’s operation made it possible to accumulate information and experience, creating increasingly favourable conditions for developing its knowledge function. Today, this dual purpose allows Syllabus to be understood as a genuine laboratory for change, capable of intervening in the training system while also helping to build a better understanding of it. The scale achieved also makes the different stages of the process more visible, from enabling access and registration to starting and completing training, and then to learning and its subsequent application at work.
The leap in scale has also made the questions that training policy must address more complex. The availability of training opportunities is essential, but the value generated depends on how administrations identify needs, engage employees, connect training pathways to professional roles and create the conditions for applying what has been learned. The NRRP phase has made these steps more visible and now offers an opportunity to address them using more mature tools.
From Investment in Training to Learning
The Directive issued by the Minister for Public Administration on January 14, 2025, consolidated this change by explicitly recognizing training as a distinct and important component of people management and establishing, among other things, a target of at least 40 training hours per employee per year.
This provision makes time devoted to learning visible, plannable and recognizable as part of working activity. It also gives senior managers clearer responsibility for planning and delivering professional development pathways. The Directive places this responsibility within a vision centred on valuing the individual, in which employees’ professional growth, organizational strengthening and the creation of public value form parts of the same process. Planning training therefore means connecting the administration’s needs with those of its employees, taking into account their roles, existing skills, development requirements and professional trajectories.
Time is one dimension of investment. The quality of that investment depends on the ability to direct it towards what the administration needs to be able to do. For this reason, training needs analysis has a strategic role. The key question becomes: what must this administration be capable of doing to achieve its objectives? From this question follow the expected organizational capabilities, the roles responsible for exercising them, the skills required and any development needs.
The Integrated Plan of Activities and Organization (PIAO) provides the ideal framework for establishing this connection. Objectives, organizational structures and human capital can be treated as parts of a single planning process. Training can thus be aligned with the administration’s priorities, while professional development needs can be identified more precisely.
Recent experience shows that this step still requires methodological investment. The growth in training planning recorded during the NRRP years represents significant progress, but the quality of plans depends on the ability to effectively connect objectives, skills, interventions, indicators and expected results. Planning achieves its full purpose when it also establishes the conditions for observing and evaluating the results actually achieved. This becomes central when training is considered an investment in organizational capacity.
The concept of competence also deserves a sufficiently broad interpretation. Knowing a regulation, a technology or a methodology is one component of professional work. Employees must also be able to apply that knowledge in practical situations and perform their roles while taking account of context, relationships, responsibilities and the consequences of decisions. Knowing, knowing how to do and knowing how to be in one’s role describe complementary dimensions of professional development.
The “Essere PA – The Academy of Public Value” programme fits within this perspective. Its pathways focusing on critical thinking, community design and the ability to navigate complexity address dimensions of how individuals interpret their roles and operate within complex organizations facing new and rapidly evolving challenges.
The same applies, in a different way, to the use of artificial intelligence. Access to these tools expands operational possibilities, but their professional use requires the ability to formulate problems, assess the quality of responses, recognize limitations and risks, integrate outputs with domain knowledge and take responsibility for the final decision. Innovative tools therefore amplify the value of skills when accompanied by sound judgement and professional awareness. Skills development encompasses knowledge, practical application and discernment.
At this point, the training process reaches a decisive stage. A well-designed programme can create the conditions for individual learning. The administrative value of that learning is subsequently built through its relationship with work and the organization. It is precisely at this stage that training enters the realm of capacity.
When Learning Becomes Part of Work
Learning takes place within the individual. Knowledge can be acquired, a skill can be practised in a training environment, and a person’s approach to interpreting problems can become more sophisticated. When that person returns to their professional setting, what they have learned encounters tasks, rules, tools, deadlines, relationships and responsibilities.
This space can be described as the “transfer space.” The concept draws on the literature on transfer of training and helps identify the organizational conditions that encourage employees to apply the knowledge and skills developed through training in their work.
Transfer depends on many factors. The assignment of relevant tasks, the degree of autonomy, opportunities to experiment, the availability of suitable tools, feedback, interaction with colleagues, work organization and the distribution of workloads all influence whether learning is put into practice. For this reason, transfer begins at the planning stage. Identifying in advance where and how a skill can be exercised strengthens the alignment between training investment, the administration’s strategy and actual work.
In this context, the manager acts as a multiplier of training investment. Given the same amount of time and resources, the same programme quality and the same level of individual learning, different management environments can produce very different organizational results.
Managers can create opportunities to apply new skills, assign tasks that make use of them, support experimentation, provide feedback, encourage team debriefings and observe how work evolves. In this way, the investment already made can generate broader effects throughout the organization.
This role, in turn, requires adequate managerial and transversal skills. Identifying employees’ needs, guiding their development, organizing work appropriately, supporting change and providing feedback are management capabilities that directly influence the transfer of learning. From this perspective, the priority given in recent years to developing leadership, managerial and transversal skills among public-sector managers becomes clear, beginning with the Directive of November 28, 2023, and subsequently reinforced by the Directive of January 14, 2025.
Transfer also involves the relationship between the individual, their role and the organization. Motivation, perceived usefulness, professional recognition and the ability to see a connection between learning and career development influence an employee’s willingness to invest in training and apply what they have learned.
Engagement in training is therefore intertwined with engagement at work. This relationship between learning, professional roles and career development forms part of the same people-centred vision that connects valuing individuals with the ability of public administrations to create public value. A skills development policy is more effective when employees understand how the investment relates to their contribution, their role and their professional trajectory.
Structured training is one component of a broader learning environment. Courses make knowledge accessible and help establish shared language and common reference points. Onboarding, job shadowing, mentoring, on-the-job training and feedback make work a source of learning by turning everyday experience into an opportunity for observation, practice and reflection. Peer learning, networks and professional communities allow knowledge to circulate, enabling solutions, mistakes, tools and practices to move beyond the boundaries of individual offices.
These mechanisms are particularly important when a significant part of professional knowledge is tacit. Many administrative capabilities develop through experience and are difficult to transfer through documents or lectures alone. Peer exchange, observation of work and communities of practice make at least part of this knowledge shareable. Professional communities can thus become a social technology for knowledge, supporting learning, professional identity and the dissemination of practices.
The circulation of knowledge opens up a further stage. An organization’s capacity grows when what individuals have learned and tested is assessed and validated within the organizational context and, where useful, transformed into codified, reusable forms.
A tested solution can become a procedure; a method can be incorporated into a tool or information system; knowledge can be shared with a group; experience can change a routine; and a community can establish a shared language and repertoire of practices.
We could describe this process as “organizational sedimentation.” The term refers to the process through which individual learning, after being applied, shared and organizationally validated, contributes to building a body of knowledge that remains available to the administration beyond the experience of any single individual.
The distinction between learning, organizational capacity and administrative capacity helps clarify this chain of value. Learning belongs to the individual. Organizational capacity develops when individuals’ knowledge and skills are incorporated, through processes of sharing, validation and codification, into practices, procedures, tools, information systems, relationships and routines that the organization can use and reproduce. Administrative capacity represents a further level: it describes the administration’s ability to pursue its objectives effectively, create public value and adapt its actions to changing needs and circumstances.
Training contributes to administrative capacity by developing people and building organizational capacity.
This perspective also changes the role of human resources. Human resources management can be understood as the architecture of organizational learning. Its task is to design the connections between what the administration needs to be able to do, what its people can do, what they need to develop and the conditions in which they can apply and share what they have learned.
Within this architecture, training connects with onboarding, professional development, mobility, role management and knowledge transfer. The professional life cycle thus also becomes a cycle for producing, using and preserving organizational knowledge.
Planning Means Preparing to Observe Change
Training evaluation begins at the planning stage, while recognizing that measuring results becomes progressively more complex as the focus moves from training activities to their effects on work and the organization.
The ability to understand the results of an intervention also depends on how clearly the expected change has been described. Planning that focuses only on participant numbers and hours makes it possible to measure mainly participation and time invested. Specifying the expected skills opens the way to evaluating learning. Identifying the contexts in which those skills should be used makes it possible to look for evidence of transfer. Finally, describing the practices and processes expected to change makes it possible to observe the development of organizational capacity using appropriate tools.
Participation, time invested, learning, transfer, changes in practices, organizational capacity and administrative results are distinct objects of observation and evaluation. Each requires indicators, sources and methods suited to the question being investigated.
This distinction also helps ensure that the concept of impact is used rigorously. Impact evaluation, in the strict sense, requires establishing a causal link between an intervention and a change, distinguishing the intervention’s contribution from that of other factors. The further the analysis moves away from individual learning and towards the administration’s overall results, the greater the number of variables involved that must be taken into account.
The theory of change underpinning planning can be described through the sequence connecting expected capabilities, identified needs, development, learning, transfer, organizational sedimentation and observable organizational capacity. Each step contains a hypothesis that can be tested using appropriate evidence. This approach avoids automatic attributions while making evaluation more ambitious, because it encourages the learning process to be followed beyond the end of the course.
Measurement is useful when it supports a decision. We measure because we need to decide. Decisions concern the design and management of interventions, as well as planning, evaluation and policy choices.
To make these decisions, quantitative and qualitative data and information are needed to describe different stages of training processes. The choice of what to collect and analyse should therefore begin with the questions that public administrations and policymakers need to answer. In this way, the information base can support planning, monitoring, the adjustment of interventions and evaluation, preparing the transition from training as a set of activities to training as a knowledge system.
Training as a Knowledge System
It is in response to this need for knowledge that Syllabus’s information function, already present in its original design, now takes on a broader role. The scale achieved, the accumulated information and the experience gained through implementation make it possible to develop this component more fully. From the outset, it was intended to build a shared knowledge base on the skills system and training investments, supporting data-driven policies.
The development pathway envisaged for Syllabus builds on this approach and extends it into the next phase. The platform’s evolution includes monitoring training, managing and making better use of data on activities undertaken outside the platform, collecting information from statistical and administrative sources, and developing architectures capable of integrating these different data flows into the information base.
Training undertaken through Syllabus represents only one part of the overall system. Public administrations, the National School of Administration (SNA), Formez PA, universities and other providers generate additional training experiences that should contribute, according to common rules and definitions, to an overall understanding of investment in human capital.
The multi-source approach expands the system’s capacity for observation and highlights the need to govern data quality, compatibility and meaning. Information from Syllabus, PIAO, the Annual Report on Public Employment, administrative information systems, assessments and qualitative surveys addresses different questions and uses units of observation, timeframes and definitions that must be made comparable. Building a knowledge base therefore requires methodological work as well as technological development.
Interoperability with the Minerva system follows the same logic. Minerva is a Human Resources Management toolkit developed by the Department of Public Administration to support strategic human capital management in public administrations by describing professional roles and profiles, expected skills and development needs.
Syllabus can connect these needs with development programmes and provide information on the training pathways undertaken. The planned two-way exchange between the two ecosystems includes, among other things, training programmes, training data, participation by administrations and employees, and information needed for integrated skills development management.
Interoperability thus becomes the digital expression of a theory of human capital management in which roles, skills, needs, development and professional experience belong to a single, integrated process.
This evolution also clarifies the meaning of Syllabus as a laboratory for change. The platform was created both to intervene and to generate knowledge. The first phase made it possible to build scale and accumulate a body of data and experience. The next phase will develop the ability to connect what happens on the platform with information originating elsewhere.
The laboratory thus acquires a systemic dimension. Observing training through to the point where it contributes to organizational capacity requires moving beyond the boundaries of a single platform and connecting sources that describe different stages of the process.
When Policy Learns Too
The information base creates value when it becomes part of governance processes. Monitoring makes it possible to track implementation, identify differences among administrations and target groups, detect unexpected developments and guide potential adjustments. Evaluation makes it possible to interpret results in relation to the questions established during planning. Finally, access to richer and more consistent data series can support comparative and longitudinal analyses, helping the system understand which tools work, in which contexts and for which recipients.
This brings the idea of a Training Observatory back into focus. Its origins date back at least to the policy guidance developed in the 1990s, when the Department was already identifying the need to monitor training needs, build information bases and encourage dialogue among the actors in the system.
The technological and informational conditions available today make it possible to give this function greater depth. An Observatory can integrate data, indicators, analyses and standards, make experiences comparable and support public administrations in planning and evaluation.
The Observatory’s role can also be understood in relation to professional communities. Communities encourage the circulation of experience among individuals and organizations; the Observatory can encourage the circulation of evidence among institutions. In both cases, knowledge creates value through sharing and reuse.
Training policy becomes capable of learning when it systematically uses what it observes during implementation to revise priorities, tools, standards and intervention methods.
A policy learning cycle therefore takes shape: planning guides interventions; implementation generates results and information; monitoring and evaluation transform that information into evidence; and the evidence informs the next round of planning.
The sustainability of the investment made during the NRRP also depends on the ability to make this cycle a routine practice and embed it in lasting institutions, processes and knowledge infrastructures.
People, Organizations and Policies That Learn
From the perspective outlined here, public-sector training can be understood as a process connecting people’s development, organizational capacity and policy learning.
Individuals learn when they develop knowledge, skills and sound judgement and are able to use them in their work. Organizations learn when individuals’ knowledge and skills, supported by motivation and opportunities in the workplace, are shared, validated and incorporated into practices and processes, becoming a reusable organizational asset. Policy learns when evidence generated through implementation is used to improve planning and the instruments available to the system.
Organizational capacity is the link through which human capital can make a lasting contribution to administrative capacity. At this level, the most useful question remains simple: what can our administration do today that it could not do yesterday?
Answering this question requires looking at people, but also at the conditions in which they work, the knowledge the organization manages to incorporate and reuse, the practices and processes it changes, and ultimately the public value these capabilities make possible and the administration’s ability to adapt its actions to changing circumstances.
The NRRP experience has rebuilt the conditions for investment in training on a systemic scale and has generated infrastructure, data, practices and knowledge that can support the next phase. The challenge now is to improve the connections between these elements. Time devoted to training must be matched by clearly identified needs; learning must find room in everyday work; experience must be able to circulate and become embedded in organizational practices; data must support decisions; and what the system observes must feed back into planning.
At these three levels, each reinforces the others. What people learn can become an asset for organizations, and what organizations learn can become knowledge for the system. A policy capable of learning can provide individuals and public administrations with better conditions for continued development.
These three levels therefore describe a single process of public-sector learning, in which individual learning strengthens organizational capacity, and organizational learning strengthens the system’s ability to govern its own change.
[1] Department of Public Administration, Training Public Administration Employees: From Policies to Evaluation, I Quaderni della Funzione Pubblica, Treccani, 2026.