What the retiring craft is worth

01 A country that hires to replace, not to grow

Every five years Unioncamere and the Ministry of Labour publish a forecast of how many workers Italian employers will need. The 2025-2029 edition puts the total between 3.28 and 3.72 million people, depending on how the economy performs. It is the composition of that figure, not its size, that deserves attention.

Hiring demand has two components. Expansion demand is the part driven by growth: new positions that exist because the business got bigger. Replacement demand is the part driven by people leaving, overwhelmingly through retirement. The first varies enormously with the economic scenario. The second does not vary at all, because demographics have already happened.

Source: Unioncamere and Ministry of Labour, Excelsior Information System, Medium-term forecast of employment needs 2025-2029, table 2.2.

Read the two replacement rows across: they are identical in all three columns. 3,042,000 people have to be replaced by 2029 whatever happens to the economy. In the most favourable scenario that is 82% of all hiring demand; in the worst, 93%. The report says it plainly: replacement demand is the component that weighs most in determining employment needs.

This is a different problem from the one companies usually prepare for. Hiring to grow means adding capability the company has never had. Hiring to replace means trying to buy back capability the company already had and is losing. And the second is harder, because what is leaving is not a job title. It is everything the person knew about how this specific company does things.

02 The ageing index, and why furniture is the extreme case

The same report carries an indicator that deserves to be better known. Excelsior calls it the ageing index: for private-sector employees, the number of workers over 55 for every 100 workers under 35. It is a blunt measure of how close a sector is to a mass handover.

Nationally the index was 65.2 in 2023, up from 61.2 two years earlier: roughly two seniors for every three juniors. In industry it was 86.2. And then there is the sector where the craft is literally the product.

Source: Excelsior, Medium-term forecast of employment needs 2025-2029, table 3.4.

Wood and furniture stands at 98.0: essentially one employee over 55 for every one under 35, the highest of any industrial supply chain in the country, and rising by more than eight points in two years. For comparison, IT and telecommunications sits at half that level. The Italian sector that sells the world its craftsmanship is the one closest to losing the people who hold it.

This is not a marginal corner of the economy. FederlegnoArredo puts the supply chain at 52.2 billion euros of turnover in 2025, over 62,000 companies and more than 292,000 employees: 14.5% of all Italian manufacturing companies, 7.6% of its workforce, 2.3% of GDP.

The forecast turns that structure into a number: 30,000 replacements in wood and furniture between 2025 and 2029, equal to 13.5% of the sector’s workforce. On any hundred people working in the sector today, roughly fourteen will have to be replaced within four years. Across industry as a whole the figure is 725,900 people, the same 13.5% share.

03 And when they leave, the replacement isn’t there

A departure would be manageable if the market offered a substitute. It does not, and least of all for the trades that matter here.

Confartigianato’s analysis of the 2025 Excelsior data puts recruitment difficulty at 47.0% of planned hires across all firms, rising to 59.7% for craft businesses, the only segment where the figure went up rather than down. Broken down by trade, the picture gets sharper: carpenters and woodworking machine setters are difficult to find in 72.8% of cases. And in the craft segment the reason is mostly not that candidates are unqualified: 35.7% of positions are hard to fill because there are no candidates at all, against 18.9% for inadequate preparation.

Behind this sits a constraint no company can negotiate with. Istat projects that the population aged 15 to 64 will fall from 37.2 million in 2024 to under 30 million by 2050, a drop of about 21%. Participation rates are expected to rise, from 66.6% to 73.2%, which softens the blow without reversing it. The pool everyone is recruiting from is shrinking, and it will keep shrinking for the working lifetime of everyone currently employed.

So the classic answer to a retirement, hire someone with the same experience, is becoming arithmetically unavailable. What remains is the other answer: make sure the experience does not leave with the person.

04 What actually walks out the door

Ask a furniture manufacturer what they lose when the head of finishing retires after thirty years, and the answer is never a list of tasks. It is a set of judgements that were never written down because they never needed to be, as long as he was there.

• Why things are done this way. Why that finish needs two extra hours in that season, why that supplier is used for that component and not the cheaper one, which of the two apparently identical procedures is the one that actually works.
• The exceptions. The client who always orders the non-standard depth, the variant that looks compatible in the catalogue and is not, the machine that runs hot in August.
• Where the truth is. Which of the four versions of that drawing is current, which price list the dealers are actually quoting from, which document was superseded and never deleted.
• The relationships. Who to call at the supplier when the order is late, which architect accepts a substitution and which one does not.

None of this is in the ERP. Some of it is in documents nobody can find, which for practical purposes is the same as not existing: our previous study measured that white-collar workers spend 19% of their working time searching for information the company already owns. Most of it is not written anywhere at all. It exists as the ability of one person to answer a question correctly on the first try.

The handover, where one happens, is usually two weeks of shadowing at the end of a notice period, arranged by people who already have a full-time job. It is not a transfer of thirty years of judgement. It is a tour of the building.

05 The cost you see and the cost you don’t

The visible cost of a departure is easy to name: recruitment, the months the position stays open, the ramp-up of whoever arrives. It shows up in a budget and it gets managed, more or less well.

The invisible cost is the one that compounds. In our study on the cost of knowledge that can’t be found, we calculated that searching for internal information already costs a company in the machinery, plant and metals sector 3,201 euros per employee per year, 6.7% of labour cost, and that is in the ordinary state of affairs, when the person who knows is still there and can be asked. Every retirement moves a slice of the company’s knowledge from the second category, hard to find, into a third one: no longer available at any price.

For a hundred-person manufacturer, the fourteen replacements the forecast implies by 2029 are not fourteen hiring problems spread over four years. They are fourteen withdrawals from a knowledge account nobody has ever measured, into which the company has been making deposits for decades without ever recording the balance.

06 What can be done, in order of feasibility

The handover problem has been known for as long as family firms have existed, and the classic answers, write procedures, pair the junior with the senior, film the workshop, all fail the same way: they cost the senior time they do not have, and they produce material nobody consults afterwards. What has changed is not the willingness to document. It is the cost of making documentation answer questions.

1. Start from what already exists. Technical sheets, assembly instructions, drawings, supplier correspondence, old quotations: most companies have far more written down than they think. It is unusable because it cannot be searched, not because it was never produced.
2. Capture the answers, not the procedures. Nobody writes a manual voluntarily. But a question asked and answered is written by definition. If those answers accumulate somewhere shared and searchable instead of in one person’s inbox, the archive builds itself out of ordinary work.
3. Record the reasons, not just the rules. A procedure that says what to do survives until the first exception. One that says why survives the exception, and the next one.
4. Do it while the person is still there. This is the only part with a deadline. Knowledge can be extracted from someone who is present and asked good questions. It cannot be extracted from an absence.

The last point is the one that turns a structural trend into a decision this year. The Excelsior numbers do not describe a risk that might materialise: they describe departures already scheduled by dates of birth. In wood and furniture, roughly one person in seven will have gone by 2029. The only variable a company still controls is whether what they know goes with them.

07 Methodological note

All figures come from primary sources, read in the original publication rather than in press coverage. The Excelsior tables were read directly from the report PDF.

• Hiring demand and replacement demand: Excelsior, medium-term forecast 2025-2029, tables 2.2 and 3.3. The replacement figure is the sum of the private (2,273,800) and public (768,200) components, and is by construction identical across the three scenarios.
• Ageing index: Excelsior, table 3.4. It covers private-sector employees only, so it excludes owners and the self-employed. In family manufacturing that exclusion, if anything, understates the ageing of the people who hold the knowledge.
• “Highest of any industrial supply chain”: in table 3.4 the residual category “other private services” is higher (105.1). Among the industrial chains, wood and furniture leads.
• 13.5% of the workforce: incidence of replacement demand on the employment stock at 31 December 2024, as published. The “fourteen out of a hundred” figure is that percentage applied to a hundred-person company, and assumes the company mirrors the sector average.
• Recruitment difficulty: Confartigianato analysis of 2025 Excelsior data. It measures planned hires reported as difficult to fill, not vacancies that stayed open.

Two figures we chose not to publish, for the record. The average time to fill a hard-to-recruit position, often quoted at 3.9 months, traces back to an Excelsior release from November 2022 and is too old to be presented as current. And the average job tenure in Italy, which would have let us convert departures into years of experience lost, is only available behind a paywall, so that calculation does not appear here.

Sources

1. Unioncamere, Ministry of Labour and Social Policies, Excelsior Information System, Previsioni dei fabbisogni occupazionali e professionali in Italia a medio termine (2025-2029), 29 August 2025 (tables 2.2, 3.3, 3.4).
2. Confartigianato, 36th economic report, 4 February 2026, analysis of Excelsior data for 2025.
3. FederlegnoArredo Research Centre, Il legno-arredo chiude il 2025 a 52,2 miliardi, April 2026.
4. Istat, Previsioni delle forze di lavoro al 2050, press release, 21 October 2025 (base 1 January 2024).
5. ekory, The cost of knowledge that can’t be found, July 2026.
6. IDC, McKinsey Global Institute, The Social Economy, 2012.