Based on research conducted by the Institute for Social Research as part of the UPFARM project, which examined long-term unemployment in Tuscany. Adapted for the blog by Impact Hub Network.
When someone has been out of work for a year or more, the instinct is to ask: What obstacles and barriers are they facing? Which skills do they lack? What support can services provide?
Research conducted in the areas involved in the UPFARM pilot shows that long-term unemployment is shaped by multiple, overlapping vulnerabilities. Addressing it effectively requires forms of support that many services are not yet equipped to provide.
How prolonged unemployment affects people
Skills become outdated and professional profiles become less attractive to employers. The habit of looking for work begins to fade. Using job-search tools, particularly digital ones, becomes increasingly difficult. Social networks shrink and self-esteem declines.
By the time people experiencing long-term unemployment reach a support service, they are often carrying the cumulative effects of being out of work for an extended period. These can include reduced motivation, growing stigma and deteriorating mental health. Many also face caring responsibilities or mobility constraints. Foreign nationals may encounter additional language and administrative barriers.
The research identifies several distinct profiles among people experiencing long-term unemployment:
- People facing severe and multiple vulnerabilities. This group includes women and men of different ages, often with lower or intermediate levels of education, who may have chronic illnesses or disabilities, or experience social isolation and marginalisation.
- People with a passive approach and psychological challenges. This group includes young people and adults with intermediate levels of education who show low motivation and initiative, fear of failure and reduced self-esteem. It also includes people over 50 whose skills have become outdated and who are unfamiliar with current job-search methods.
- People facing structural and social barriers. This group includes women carrying significant caring responsibilities or experiencing limited mobility, as well as migrants facing overlapping barriers, including language difficulties. It also includes discouraged and economically inactive people with limited skills and little or no previous work experience.
Other common characteristics include low digital literacy, reluctance to participate in training or reskilling, and engagement with services driven primarily by benefit-related requirements.
It is therefore clear that standard employment support interventions are unlikely to create lasting benefits for these groups. Services are often delivered as isolated measures that fail to consider the different dimensions of a person’s vulnerability.
A CV-writing course cannot rebuild someone’s confidence in the labour market. Training alone cannot address social isolation. Job placements that overlook the complexity of a person’s needs are rarely effective.
What actually works
The clearest finding from the research is that the most effective support for people experiencing long-term unemployment is integrated and multidisciplinary.
This means moving beyond a simple referral to another service or a programme with a fixed end date. Instead, people need continuous support that connects employment assistance with social and educational support, as well as relationship-building. Professionals from the different services involved in a person’s care must work together, rather than along parallel tracks.
However, collaboration between services is not always supported by a formal policy or regulatory framework. More often, it develops through the daily cooperation of frontline professionals. It is built through shared knowledge, regular communication and the gradual development of trust between different parts of the system.
This is a form of integration that begins from the bottom up. Where it succeeds, it may later become formalised at an institutional level.
Service integration alone is not enough. Equal attention must be paid to the type of work being offered. Sectors, roles and working environments need to be selected carefully, particularly for people facing the greatest vulnerabilities.
Social farming can play a crucial role in this context, especially for people with complex needs or mental health challenges. Agricultural settings can provide a protected, non-judgemental environment where people gradually rebuild motivation and independence. They can develop skills at a pace that respects their individual circumstances.
However, social farming pathways still struggle to lead to stable employment. Placements are often temporary, tied to funding for specific projects and concentrated in lower-skilled roles. The potential is there, but the structural conditions needed to realise it at scale are not yet in place.
The structural problems we need to name
The research also identifies several systemic issues that extend beyond the individual experiences of people facing long-term unemployment.
The first is that national and regional policies rarely recognise people experiencing long-term unemployment as a specific target group. Instead, they tend to be included within broader categories of disadvantage, such as people facing vulnerability, poverty or social exclusion, and people with disabilities.
A policy designed to address vulnerability in general is unlikely to be as effective as an intervention tailored specifically to people experiencing long-term unemployment. The longer someone remains out of work, the more their circumstances tend to deteriorate, affecting other areas of their life.
The second issue is that services addressing different forms of vulnerability are not always integrated or coordinated. Employment services operate in one place, social services in another and specialist services somewhere else, each following its own working practices and using its own tools.
However, professionals in the Tuscan areas covered by the research have worked to bridge these gaps. They have developed genuinely collaborative ways of working which, although initially encouraged by specific pilot projects or policy measures, have continued over time and become established practice.
It is also important to recognise the pressure faced by service professionals themselves. Supporting people with multidimensional needs over long periods, while managing heavy workloads and limited resources, is creating a real risk of burnout across the sector. Unless this is properly addressed, it will threaten the long-term sustainability of the support system itself.
The third issue is that businesses remain the weakest link and the most difficult actors to reach and engage. Employers tend to favour candidates who can be productive immediately. Many lack the organisational capacity or awareness needed to support workers with more complex needs.
Incentives and employment intermediation can help to some extent, but they cannot replace the deeper changes in workplace culture and practices that sustainable inclusion requires.
What needs to happen
Long-term unemployment develops over time and affects multiple areas of a person’s life. Yet the current system remains poorly equipped to address it effectively in its full complexity.
The approaches that create meaningful change for people and service systems are already known. What is needed is greater investment in integrated working practices, alongside an ongoing commitment to exchange and genuine collaboration.
This means breaking down the boundaries that currently separate employment services from social and specialist services. It also requires stronger connections with training, education, housing services and businesses.
This points to the need for greater institutional commitment to organising services around people’s needs, rather than the convenience of separate budgets and mandates.
Closing these gaps would help create systems in which people feel included and can begin rebuilding their lives. It would also give the professionals supporting them the conditions they need to do their work sustainably and effectively.