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The purpose of this paper is to analyze how remote working has been carried out during the first wave of the pandemic in Italian SMEs, representing at the same time an organizational challenge and an excellent opportunity for individual and organizational learning.

This paper involved 60 Italian SMEs of various sectors and 330 employees: 217 clerks (average age 42) and 113 managers (average age 48) belonging to different functional units and with a different education backgrounds. Two different questionnaires, one addressed to clerks and one to managers/executives who coordinate the remote working activity, were prepared and sent. This paper investigates the issues of perceived productivity, technological preparation, coordination, programming and control with specific attention to how the participants faced the remote working experience from the learning point of view.

Before the pandemic, Italian SMEs did not feel the necessity to adopt a structured policy on remote working. The COVID-19 emergency has forced them to consider that working remotely is possible and can produce benefits and positive results for what they learned in terms of autonomy, motivation and trust, to the detriment of physical presence, which is not as fundamental to ensure productivity.

While large, formalized and structured companies encountered modest difficulties being already technologically and culturally prepared for remote working, the big challenge was that of SMEs, who found themselves obliged to adopt it. This paper examines how Italian SMEs lived and evaluated the switch to a new work organization and turned it into an occasion for workplace learning.

Frequently the universities' Placement Service is based on the student's hard profile at the expense of soft traits. On the other side, the “person–organization fit” axiom suggests firms are looking for profiles with specific soft skills to face the increasing level of environmental turbulence. This research aims to understand if high-resilience students also have high academic achievements and how the three components of resilience (emotional intelligence, positive thinking, planfulness) can have different impact on individual performances.

The research was conducted on students enrolled on different courses of studies and years in an Economics and Law faculty. A questionnaire was administered during the first exam session (ante-Covid) and the second and third exam sessions (post-Covid). This questionnaire consists of 84 questions related to planfulness, emotional intelligence and positive thinking, whose combination can be considered a measure of resilience. In fact, the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was carried to identify these three new variables (the components) based on the 84 initial ones. Finally, an ordered logit model was implemented to verify whether, and in what direction, planfulness, emotional intelligence, positive thinking and Covid 19 (the independent variables) affected the students' performance (the dependent one).

While planfulness positively affected academic performance, emotional intelligence affected it negatively. The impact of positive thinking and Covid was not significant, and thus what emerged from the preliminary analysis of the grades is not confirmed.

This is a case study of a university experience that is paying great care in preparing students to satisfy the firms' work demands. To confirm and refine results the sample will be expanded to other faculties and other life/soft skills will be investigated.

This soft trait approach—that studies how various measures of soft skills are related to course grades—has a two-fold significance by crafting universities' placement activities and facilitating firms' onboarding.

This is a case study of a university experience; a university that is paying great attention to preparing students ready to satisfy the firms' work demands but also citizens capable of supporting the growth of their nation and society in general.

The research can be considered a first step towards the inclusion of the formal evaluation of the students' life skills in their academic path, creating a link with their achievements.