The "16hoursbefore” is an important innovation introduced into the National Collective Contracts of Employment (Construction Industries, Construction Craftsmanship, Construction SMEs, Construction Cooperatives). This contractual condition requires construction enterprises to notify the employment of any worker entering the construction sector for the first time to the Construction Workers’ Fund within 3 days before actual access on the site.
Once the Local Building School has been notified, it will request the worker to take part in the 16-hour course to acquire basic knowledge on construction and safety. This project ensures that national law requirements on job safety are fulfilled on one side and on the other it is helping to straighten out the market and provide young potential workers with a minimum of basic knowledge so that they will be able to enter the construction industry and work on a building site in a competent and safe way.
It is a type of professional training aimed at making a new worker capable of carrying out, in a productive, professional and safe way, the tasks that are usually assigned to a new employee and that constitute the basic knowledge of that job. From its development until now more than 35,000 enterprises and nearly 50,000 new workers have used the ‘16hours first’ contract innovation.
Most of the 16 hours which are done in two consecutive days take place in laboratories. Foreign workers, also the ones with poor knowledge of the Italian language, can participate in the course by making use of tailor-made language tools (simultaneous translation via mobile phone).
At the end of the course (2nd day in the afternoon) the trainee receives the Training Certificate. The enterprise is also given a training certificate to be used as a document which proves that relevant legal requirements have been fulfilled.