The paper aims to critically question economistic models that inspired the neoclassical view based on the supply and demand theory and to push forward a new vision that sees learning and occupational outcomes as the result of an intricate articulation and proliferation of experiences (which are both training and work), mediated by relational networks (Granovetter 1985), technological artefacts (Garcia et al. 2006), developed on local, national and international scale. Our main thesis is that youngers who accumulate a varied series of brief work experiences in different workplaces during and after their studies may develop the key skill of being able to combine specific skills and ri-manipulate and accommodate them to a continuous transition in the labour market. But which is the real core of this social competence? This variety of experiences indicates what happens ‘inside’ but also ‘after’ completing higher education. It is configured as a territory of extended learning that tensions classical visions of the transition from university to work. The transition is in fact no more considerable as a passage between different worlds and can no longer be analysed according to the traditional theories - especially the ones with economic backgrounds – based on matching between education, training and labour market (Fleetwood, 2014).

In addition, several phenomena contribute to shake the more traditional view of the transition, among these: the destabilization of the work; the increasing mobility of young people in education and vocational training and labour markets (both nationally and internationally); the role of technology as subjects helping to create opportunities and mobility; the affirmation of flexibility (Sennett, 1998) that invests and will invest more and more the new generations. These phenomena - now on relevant on local and global scale - ask to sociology and the sociology of education to elaborate new conceptual maps and interpretive theorizing about continuous transitions between education, training and workplaces.

In light of this, what happens in the lives of people who no longer experience, as it was traditionally understood a single transition between education and work? How is the experience of learning shaped when persons after graduation live for many years in a social, spatial, temporal condition which is innovative? A social condition that cannot be defined in advance, but that is being built just from the experiences of the subjects?

Post-university experiences – such as formal learning, professional training, learning on the job, informal e non formal learning) seem to have an undefinable and non-sequential duration. They constitute a challenge, a risk but also an opportunity. The trajectories of the traditional transition are subverted: young people passing through different experiences make up a mosaic of individual learning and individualization that may have many outcomes: one concludes higher education while working in temporary poor jobs, someone else tips for an apprenticeship or a master. Others seek or accept a professional position opposite to the ideal one while ongoing in training. There are those who decide to work for a short period before returning to study. Furthermore, work itself, or more often the number of different workplaces, vulnerable and non-standard (precarious, underpaid, unregulated, more or less visible) connects a collage of variegated experiences that can last many years or forever. These experiences are based on relational networks and are part of mobile lives as Elliot and Urry (2010) have stressed. Furthermore, the europeanization of the educational space allows a multiplication of geographical and institutional references (something such as Erasmus generation) which start to be reflected also at professional level, since younger generations are increasingly looking at Europe as their learning, training and occupational arena.

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