From Bureaucrats to In-and-outers: does the new Italian Recovery Plan call for a new public manager?

The new Italian Recovery Plan opens up a new concept of a public manager focused on competencies and continuous training. This paper investigates the possible presence of four ideal types of Italian public managers in regional governments. Questionnaires were electronically submitted to a sample of Italian public managers working in Regional Governments. Data were analyzed using principal component analysis and cluster analysis to detect the presence of and changes in clusters of career patterns for Italian public managers. The results confirm the presence of different career patterns and discuss how different combinations of training and mobility can determine distinctive human resource plans for developing the public managers of the future. Finally, it highlights that mobility is not always a positive factor, but it could be disruptive for both the organizational and systemic level.