Simonetta Iarlori at Mathematics Dialogues: Transversal knowledge, a model for young people and educators

10 May 2021

Leonardo’s Chief People Organisation and Transformation Officer meets the Italian Minister of Education, Patrizio Bianchi.

“Leonardo is ready and willing to collaborate with the Ministry of Education to train educators in the skills required by firms to develop transversal knowledge through a model influenced by the worlds of science and humanities,” stated Simonetta Iarlori, Leonardo’s Chief People Organisation and Transformation Officer, to Italian Minister of Education, Patrizio Bianchi during the digital event, ‘Mathematics Dialogues’.

“We have lots of STEM skills, and we could help the ministry greatly in training educators,” underlined Simonetta Iarlori. “We not only have to broaden students’ understanding of mathematics, but first and foremost, we must work on their teachers’ understanding. As a company, we are dedicated to proposing a clearer explanation of what we really need: transversal skills.”

The second session of Mathematics Dialogues, co-produced by Fondazione Musica per Roma with the contribution of Leonardo, among others, aimed to explain how to attract new generations to the field of education, underlining that teaching maths and other STEM subjects is part of every educational agenda. 

However, this does not mean disregarding our classical studies, which should not be considered as alternatives. Classical and scientific studies are languages that must both be used by young people to understand a world that is becoming increasingly complex.

To support learning content, educational content must be increased, and on this point, Simonetta Iarlori stressed a desire to build “a growth path together with the Ministry of Education: with the  companies using more targeted recruiting and the ministry supporting training.” Leonardo can contribute to such an approach by “explaining digitalisation to educators, which still represents a hurdle to learning in Italy.” Simonetta Iarlori then made a pledge to Minister Bianchi: “I offer Leonardo’s support, in part through the Leonardo Civiltà delle Macchine Foundation, with an awareness of the importance of assisting the education sector by explaining what our needs are.”

Leonardo, after all, is based on the concept of transversal skills. “Here, we hire both engineers and humanists. It’s clear that lateral thinking is useful and that we need to support institutions in furthering education by offering our tools. We don’t want to limit ourselves to STEM fields though,” clarified Leonardo’s Chief People Organisation and Trasformation Officer, “because we want to support education from every angle. For example, music (which has a mathematical base) and art are two languages – two different forms of expression – but behind them both is a deep knowledge that we want to promote and transfer to our people.”

What truly matters, in Simonetta Iarlori’s opinion, “is not just having a degree in aerospace engineering, but having the ability to apply your knowledge in evolutionary processes that are more complex than those developed so far.” With this in mind, “companies, alongside the government, must commit to training and ‘modelling’. If companies don’t introduce real-world needs to models, nobody can ever change culture.” At Leonardo, where Artificial Intelligence comes to life in the new davinci-1 supercomputer, Iarlori’s ambition is to “model the organisations of the future: so many human phenomena can be modelled to make Artificial Intelligence serve mankind.”