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CONTINUITY AS A SYSTEMIC APPROACH TO MANPOWER TRAINING AND
DEVELOPMENT OF OPERATIONAL CONDITIONS OF ITS USE
N.E. Kolesnikov
The professional qualification potential of regional and national manpower and its continuous build-up and qualitative growth, in particular through the operation of the system of lifelong professional education, is the key driver of the economic and social development in the country. At the same time, serious problems existing both at the stage of its creation (in education institutions within the system of professional education) and, to a greater degree, in the context of its implementation in the spheres of production and labor, prevent it from being effective to the fullest extent possible. Let us consider some of the aspects of the complex mechanism of creation and implementation of the professional qualification potential of manpower.
The efficiency of implementation of knowledge, skills and abilities acquired in a professional education institution depends, primarily and to a great, if not decisive, extent, on the choice of the sphere of employment and future occupation of school leavers.
The causes of serious mismatches between the needs of regions and the country as a whole for a certain professional structure of skilled workers and specialists and the existing structure of professions offered by regional professional education institutions and national education centers and ways of overcoming them have been the subject of discussion in this country and society for a few decades. School leavers, and hence their parents, in the overwhelming majority of cases give preference to professions taught within the system of higher professional education. According to annual research into occupational intentions among school leavers, conducted by the Higher School of Economics (VShE) together with the Russian Statistics Committee (Rosstat), the Public Opinion Foundation and Levada Center, about 88% of households prefer their children to have higher education, with 57.4% of them being ready to pay for this. Upon the completion of the 9th grade, 62% of students are ready to continue studying in secondary schools; 11% are ready to enter technical colleges and only 5% would agree to enter a vocational school or lyceum. It is from among the remaining undecided 20% that vocational schools and specialized secondary schools recruit their students [1]. When generalized, these proportions fit a well-known 30% to 70% ratio, where the former is the percentage of graduating skilled workers (primary and secondary vocational education) and the latter is the percentage of graduating
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specialists (higher professional education). What would be more preferable for the national economy is a reverse ratio, with 70% being accounted for by skilled workers and 30% by specialists.
As a result of the existing misalignment in the system of training staff with different qualifications, regional economies and industries get workers and specialists who are poorly motivated to work efficiently and build up and develop their professional qualification potential. Moreover, there are lot of graduates from technical schools and colleges who do not intend to work in their occupation at all, but regard their studies as a step toward entering a higher education institution. Hence, the deficit of skilled manpower, mainly of skilled staff of the lower and middle level (workers, technicians, junior specialists) which has been experienced acutely by the national economy in recent years. The professional structure of admission and graduation of skilled workers and specialists with the middle and higher qualification levels is expected to be optimized in a number of dimensions, being driven by a number of factors. First of all, the current reform and modernization of higher education will, definitely, raise requirements to the status of higher education institutions, mainly with respect to the quality of their core activity — training specialists with appropriate level of qualification. Many higher education institutions are expected not to be able to meet the new requirements and their number will be significantly reduced, leaving fewer competitors to secondary and primary vocational education institutions in the competition for students. The choice of professions and higher education institutions available to school leavers will be less rich but, on the other hand, more realistic and reliable in terms of future career perspectives. This will help solve the current problem of the mass under-utilization of knowledge gained in higher education institutions, whereas the opportunity to select a desired profession (provided necessary personal characteristics are in place) will always be available.
We believe that an occupational consultation and guidance service should improve its practical assistance to school leavers and their parents in selecting a profession (subject to one's interests, abilities and capabilities). To this end, occupational guidance specialists should have access to forecasts for the development of their respective regions, including indicators of the development of the labor market for at least 10 years going forward, so that a graduate of any vocational school would be able to work in the projected operational and employment environment in the future. With all the importance of the role played by an occupational consultation and guidance service, some specialists, employers and experts believe that the major cause of the current distortions in the
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professional structure of graduating skilled workers and specialists is associated with inappropriate operation of occupational guidance services [2], and this statement cannot be deemed groundless. Today, you do not hear many say seriously that school leavers mainly enter higher rather than secondary and, still less, primary vocational education institutions, only because they have received bad recommendations from occupational guidance specialists. There are many reasons for this, the main ones being work itself, which differs considerably in terms of content and conditions between workers, engineers and, even more so, office workers; and second, remuneration, which plays by no means the least role here and often differs considerably between workers and specialists with high education, with the difference being not in favor of the former, etc. Only radical transformations, mainly in the content and conditions of work at industrial enterprises, will help improve not only the content and conditions but also the culture of work, rendering skilled blue-collar occupations intellectually intensive, and so on. Young people will be more enthusiastic about mastering such occupations and skills. But these efforts, which are quite time and money consuming, should involve the reconstruction of production, technology and work management, and upgrading of all skilled blue-collar jobs in their entirety. Renewal of the content of blue-collar occupations, skilled blue-collar jobs and the entire sphere of production and labor will be a determinative factor for promoting interest in this type of socially necessary work and related occupations among young people.
So far, we can only trust in occupational guidance specialists, but there is little they can change in the current situation where jobs are hardly renewed and the process of their evaluation for working conditions and occupational health, as required by the Labor Code of the Russian Federation, is very slow. These efforts are undertaken by the regional offices of the State Labor Inspectorate at the expense of employers. Only a small percentage of jobs in the region are examined and evaluated every year due to a limited number of human resources. For example, only 2.85% of jobs existing in business entities in St. Petersburg were evaluated in 2009 (2008: 3.1%). Although the evaluation is required by labor laws, employers are very reluctant about it. This is understandable, because these efforts are, among other things, costly (evaluation costs amount to about 3,000 rubles per job). But this concerns job evaluation for working conditions and occupational health. Another task — to examine and describe jobs in order to upgrade them (and efforts to complete it) — will be even more complicated. But without all this the modernization of industry may turn out to be inefficient.
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In order to improve performance of primary and secondary vocational education institutions in the regions, new organizational forms are currently created and developed. Innovative educational and professional clusters based on a corporation of regional secondary vocational education institutions are becoming widely popular. Regional systems of manpower training on the basis of integration between institutes of primary, secondary, higher and post-higher professional education are developed in the framework of the socio-economic development programs in the constituent entities of the Russian Federation. It is our opinion that in the future, the professional education system should expand its integration links beyond its boundaries to reach the sphere of production, i.e. the area where the professional qualification potential of graduates is realized. This is about creating a sort of cluster, which will rely on the logically operating and objectively necessary integration links and corporate relations between the sphere of professional education on the one hand and the sphere of production on the other. Each region can create relevant cluster associations between the professional education and production spheres, subject to the scope and structure of its economy and available education potential. Their key task is to build, maintain and continuously develop interactions between the spheres of production and manpower training. Not only education should take into account demands of the sphere of production, but also production should take into account requirements of graduates from professional education institutions both as professionals and personalities with their own socio-cultural demands.
The most important characteristic of the operation of such an education and production cluster is the continuity of the flow of mutual information about the existing and future (expected) processes, their changes and development. This continuity means a certain unity and integrity of an operating system which is composed of discrete elements (components, such as vocational education and business entities). The complexity of the problem is associated with eliminating misalignment between all elements of the education and production cluster, in the absence of which it is impossible to achieve efficiency of this cluster as one of the most productive forms of preparing for work and performing it.
References
1. Среднее профессиональное образование. № 8. 2010. С. 30.
2. Российская газета, от 2 февраля 2011 г.
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