The most deficient areas of training were industrial ecology and biotechnology, mechanical engineering, chemical technology and materials technology.
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Today, much is said about the importance of secondary vocational education in Russia, and much is being done to develop it. To meet the personnel needs of the domestic industry, the federal project “Professionalism” was created. But “thin” places still remain. To identify them, a group of researchers from the Center for Economics of Continuing Education at the Institute of Applied Economic Research of the Presidential Academy — Larisa Bedareva, Tatyana Blinova, Elena Lomteva and Alexander Fedotov — conducted a comprehensive analysis. The study revealed an imbalance between the volume and structure of training of mid-level specialists and the needs of the economy of a number of Russian regions.
“Bringing the volume and structure of training mid-level specialists in line with the need for personnel necessary for the development of regional economies is becoming especially relevant in the context of sanctions restrictions, which have brought to the forefront the issues of ensuring the technological sovereignty of a number of sectors of the domestic economy,” Bedareva said, justifying the importance of the study.
The analysis was based on Rostrud data on the employment of graduates who completed their studies in secondary vocational education programs, federal statistical observation data on the SPO-1 form for 2017–2023, and materials from sociological surveys on the motives for employment of secondary vocational education graduates.
“The analysis of sociological research data allowed us to identify regional heterogeneity in graduate employment. The structure and volume of training of mid-level specialists does not fully meet the needs of both regional economies and the economy as a whole. The most in-demand areas of training include the groups of specialties “industrial ecology and biotechnology”, “mechanical engineering”, “chemical technology and materials technology”, — Blinova reported.
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Some regions are in dire need of specialists of a certain profile, when others produce them in abundance. This fact speaks to the need to formulate targeted programs for the transfer of graduates. For example, in the specialty “Shipbuilding” in 2022 in the Kamchatka Territory, Murmansk and Astrakhan regions, the employment rate of graduates was in the range of 58–68%, which may indicate excessive training. While in St. Petersburg, Khabarovsk and Primorsky territories it is close to 100%.
Educational and production centers that unite colleges and enterprises, according to researchers, also do not yet confirm sufficiently effective work in meeting the personnel needs of industry with graduates of secondary vocational education. Perhaps the low percentage of employment of graduates who have completed them is due to the departure of young people to other areas due to the low wages offered at specialized enterprises (two to three times less than the average wage in the region).
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Despite this, “it is worth noting the growing interest of representatives of the real sector of the economy in training mid-level specialists in strategically important areas of implementing technological sovereignty projects,” Lomteva noted. Over the period from 2017 to 2022, the share of graduates who studied in training programs for mid-level specialists within the framework of targeted training increased in the Krasnoyarsk Territory by 25.3 percentage points, in the Moscow Region by 13.7 percentage points, in the Astrakhan Region — 10 .4 p.p., Republic of Tatarstan – 9.7 p.p. “Thus, at present we can only talk about the first steps of the open source system to fulfill the task of staffing technological sovereignty, which do not yet produce large-scale results, but allow us to outline directions for further action. The analysis shows the problems facing the authorities of the open source software system in this area, and allows us to determine the most relevant directions for further transformation of the system, necessary for the successful and timely implementation of technological sovereignty projects,” concluded Fedotov.