The New Public Administration: data and human resources

The main training aims of the PhD program are:

1. Training highly qualified doctoral students in human resource management within public administrations, with a focus on human capital and data governance.
2. Developing innovative profiles of public managers equipped with an innovative set of knowledge and skills in management, technology and design.
3. Offering a targeted multidisciplinary educational program, with national and international research paths combining the methodologies proper to academic research with the design requirements specific for public administrations.

 The PhD course aims to provide the doctoral student with the necessary research methodologies and data analysis to be used primarily - though not exclusively - for a career in public administrations. Accordingly, the research topics are extremely varied and cross-cutting, thanks to an interdisciplinary scientific-teaching approach, involving different fields such as law, economics and statistics, management and organization studies, public policy and public administration, computer science, psychology, sociology, educational sciences, medicine and sciences.

Career opportunities

As it is well known, career prospects in the public sector requires a previous successful participation in a public competition. In this perspective, job opportunities in this field will depend, first and foremost, on whether public administrations actually offer positions corresponding to the educational level of PhDs. On this latter topic, Decree Law No. 80/2021 has provided for the creation of a new functional area, aimed at the placement of highly qualified/skilled personnel, to be defined through the collective bargaining. The most recent National Contract for Central Administrations (ministries, tax agencies and non-economic public bodies) complied with the just mentioned legislative provision by establishing an area dedicated to high-skilled personnel (in Italian “Elevata Professionalità – EP”, which means “high professionality”). This PhD program intends to address precisely to this new professional position. Finally, another possible professional opportunity concerns a career as a researcher in public institutions, research centers and universities at national and international level.

The PhD program consists of an initial training common to both curricula (1st semester of the 1st year for at least 8 CFU) and subsequent curricular teaching (2nd semester of the first year and 2nd and 3rd years for at least 4 CFU per year for each curriculum). The doctoral students are required to spend a period of study and research in a public administration (from 6 to 12 months) during the 2nd or 3rd year.

The training of the program is:

• entirely "ad hoc" designed , with tailor made projects shaped around the features of the candidates and the types of public administrations involved in the project
• subdivided into groups of courses, homogeneous in terms of topics and activated according to specific training needs
• offered in Italian and/or English
• integrable with classes belonging to the UNIMIB doctoral courses (e.g., Economics, Statistics and Data Science; Business for Society; Computer Science; Chemical, Geological and Environmental Sciences; Legal Sciences; Education; Psychology; Public Health; URBEUR) and with the classes constituting the cross-curricular offerings of the UNIMIB Doctoral School
• developed with the contribution of other Universities (UNIFI, UNIMI, UNIVE) and individual PAs involved in the program

All the educational activities offered are available on e-learning platform: https://elearning.unimib.it/course/index.php?categoryid=9402&lang=en