Italy’s labour market continues to expand in May 2025, with more than 528,000 hires planned by businesses, marking a 7 per cent increase compared to the same period last year. According to the Excelsior bulletin published by Unioncamere, this trend is driven primarily by the services sector, which has seen a 10.4 per cent rise in recruitment, while industry has experienced a slight decline. Within this context, the transport, logistics and warehousing sector is taking on an increasingly strategic yet challenging role for the entire production system.
Logistics stands out among the sectors that rely most heavily on foreign workers, with 26.7 per cent of planned hires in the sector allocated to immigrant labour, compared to a national average of 18.4 per cent. This figure confirms a trend already observed in previous months, with similarly high or higher percentages indicating a structural difficulty in the domestic market’s ability to meet the growing demand for personnel.
Looking at data from January to April 2025, demand in the logistics sector has remained consistently high. The area, which includes procurement, internal goods handling, transport and distribution, has recorded between 53,000 and 66,000 planned hires each month. At the same time, recruitment difficulties have remained severe, ranging from 40 per cent to over 50 per cent. In particular, the transport and distribution subsector reported a 50.5 per cent difficulty rate in April, clearly highlighting the struggle companies face in sourcing suitable professional profiles.
These challenges become even more evident when examining specific occupations. Operational roles most directly involved in logistics activities, such as vehicle drivers and operators of material handling equipment, are increasingly hard to find. In April 2025, the difficulty rate for recruiting drivers reached 47.7 per cent, while for operators of lifting and handling machinery it climbed to 62.7 per cent, well above the critical threshold. Even more administrative roles, such as logistics management staff, show significant levels of mismatch.
The shortage of qualified personnel is also reflected in education-related data. As early as January, secondary school diplomas specialising in “Transport and logistics” were already associated with a 43 per cent recruitment difficulty rate, indicating that educational and technical training programmes are failing to meet the needs expressed by businesses. This gap is directly reflected in the composition of the workforce, which is increasingly reliant on staff from abroad.
