Erasmus Staff Training Visit to Universita Carlo Cattaneo – LIUC

July 2012

Information learnt from visiting the External Relations and Placements Service at Universita Carlo Cattaneo – LIUC in Castellanza, Italy.

  • Here is a link to the CV (in Italian) the Placements Service recommends to students: the sentence on the bottom re privacy – this is Italian law and must go on all CVs.
  • For general information on CVs, see
  • Most students go into internships after graduation rather than permanent jobs: Italian law states that in the 12 months after graduation students are allowed to have up to two internships. The internships are often the first time the student/graduate has ever worked.
  • Internships are usually paid but the pay is very low. The work does not also need to be of graduate level unless being used as a basis of a thesis.
  • Engineering students must do a compulsory 300 hour internship and use it as a basis for their thesis.
  • Recruitment processes in Italy seem similar to here in terms of interviews and assessment centres.
  • Students are advised to register on LinkedIn.
  • Students are advised not to do PhDs unless they are working at the same time because companies have to pay people with PhDs more and so they could miss out on being selected for jobs.
  • The Italian graduate labour market seems to be very linear compared to the UK: in Italy graduate employers only take on people with relevant degree subjects. This causes particular problems for law students because there are more law graduates than the number of relevant jobs and so the unemployment rate for law students is higher than all the other subjects.
  • Another thing that I noticed was that the vast majority of students had done an Erasmus placement or some other type of experience abroad and this really seemed to give them a lot of international confidence. Their language skills were excellent and a lot of them spoke about how they had learnt to live independently abroad etc. As a result they seem to be able to compete very well for international jobs – one of the interns I met had secured a job in Spain and another in Holland.