The seventh edition of the annual Report by the Job4Good Observatory, Skills in the Third Sector 2026, has been published. The research analyses the 2023–2025 period through 5,275 job postings on the platform from 1,057 Italian nonprofit organisations, for a total of 9,049 professional mentions. The methodology is based on behavioural data — what organisations write in job ads when they hire — rather than perception surveys: a choice that allows reading the actual demand of the sector.

Five key findings emerge from the three-year period:

1. Fundraising and Project Management lead 2025. Fundraising is the largest area in 2025 with 12.20% of mentions, with continuous growth (11.55% in 2023, 12.20% in 2025). Project Management ranks second at 11.69% and shows the sharpest growth: +2.01 percentage points in 2025 alone. Together they account for nearly a quarter of all 2025 mentions.

2. International cooperation loses its lead. The “Cooperante” area, the top one in 2023 with 13.17%, drops to 7.33% in 2025. The figure does not signal a contraction of the sector, but an internal recomposition of demand: fewer field profiles, more coordination and reporting roles.

3. Emerging skills: ESG quadruples, IT enters for the first time. Sustainability and ESG move from 0.20% in 2023 to 0.83% in 2025. IT, which was absent in 2023, reaches 0.73% in 2025. Still small shares in absolute terms, but meaningful as indicators of new skills demands the sector did not previously express.

4. Contract forms become more regular, but stability does not increase. Over the three-year period, fixed-term contracts grow from 28.5% to 35.6%, freelance contracts (co.co.co.) drop from 27.5% to 19.8%, but permanent contracts remain the smallest share of the sector: from 7.5% to 7.6% in three years. Atypical contracts give way to more structured forms, but underlying stability does not move.

5. Pay transparency: growing, but still a minority. In 2025, 27.5% of postings include economic information, compared to 20% in 2023. 12.4% explicitly state the gross annual salary (RAL). 72.5% remain without any economic information, just days before the entry into force in Italy of EU Directive 2023/970 on pay transparency.

On the territorial level, the Report shows a strongly concentrated geography of nonprofit job demand: Milan accounts for 36.27% of positions, Rome for 21.10%, Turin for 5.40%, the third Italian hub of the sector. The North-West concentrates 49.9% of overall demand.

The Job4Good Observatory is the longitudinal monitoring effort the platform dedicates to the Italian nonprofit labour market. Launched in 2018, now in its seventh edition, it is one of the few Italian sources that read the Third Sector through labour demand data, year after year.

Job4Good is the Italian vertical platform for work in the Third Sector. An innovative startup and Benefit Company headquartered in Turin, it is part of the Torino Social Impact ecosystem and has contributed to placing the professionalisation of nonprofit work on the territorial strategic agenda.

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