The Italian labor market arrives in September 2026 with a basic fact: employment is growing, but so is the gap between available skills and those required by companies. It is a dynamic that closely concerns digital communication, where technology, data and artificial intelligence are rapidly changing professional profiles and activities.
According to Istat, in the second quarter of 2026, the number of employees rose to 24,363 million, 155 thousand more than the previous quarter and 246 thousand more on an annual basis. The employment rate reached 63.1%, while the unemployment rate stood at 5.6%. The provisional figures for July confirm 24.370 million people employed and an employment rate of 63.2%.
On the business front, September brings 565,000 scheduled revenues, which become 1.5 million considering the September-November quarter. 65.6% of opportunities come from services and the difficulty of finding reaches 44%. A market, therefore, still capable of creating demand, but increasingly selective with respect to skills.
For those who work in digital communication, the change is particularly evident. Marketing, content, social media, advertising, data analysis and online reputation management tend to converge in hybrid professional profiles. The Excelsior database, in the last detailed survey available by profession, recorded 15,640 entries for marketing technicians and 5,790 for public relations and image specialists. For marketing technicians, digital skills were considered very important by 90% of companies; for PR specialists, the share reached 98%.
However, 2026 adds a decisive accelerator: artificial intelligence. ISTAT data published in 2026 show that in 2025, 16.4% of companies with at least 10 employees used AI technologies, compared to 8.2% in 2024. In marketing and sales, AI was already used by 33.1% of the companies that adopted these technologies.
This is where the new challenge for communication professions opens up. It is not simply a matter of replacing traditional tools with generative tools, but of knowing how to integrate them into the process: from strategy to content production, from audience analysis to measurement of results.
Perhaps the most significant figure remains the one on skills: in 2025, only 54.3% of Italians between 16 and 74 years old had at least basic digital skills. In 2026, this gap therefore also becomes an employment issue. For the digital communicator, knowing how to use technology is no longer an accessory competitive advantage: it is an integral part of the profession.