SWA/PTSO Projects. Career trajectories and student educational pathways. Building of a typology

The recent law (l. 145/2018) on Pathways for Transversal Competences and Orientation (PTSOs), which replaced the School-Work Alternance (SWA), confers to the Italian upper secondary schools a central role in promoting educational paths oriented to the development of both professional and soft skills. The paper aims to discuss the characteristics of SWA/PTSO projects that involve upper secondary school students in cultural or work training activities. Project corpora were analysed using the 'content analysis as survey'. It allowed to identify the most significant associations between the constitutive elements of the projects developed by the schools. In the typology of projects are differently combined: i. soft skills to be developed by the students (e.g., citizenship, vocational and managerial skills); ii. educational methods used to implement the activities (differentiated into learning by doing or learning by thinking).