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PROBLEMS OF CONTINUOUS PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF PERSONEL DURING GLOBALIZATION AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS A. E. Suleymankadieva
Significant changes have taken place in the development of Russia’s economy recently, which are characterized by the following tendencies that we will briefly describe below.
1) an expansion of the borders of markets. A manufacturing firm encounters goods on its local market which were manufactured in a different country. This phenomenon leads to increased competition. The participation of an organization on a local market is no longer a guarantee of stability.
2) the lifecycle of goods is reduced. On a competitive market, an organization can hold its position by: (a) constantly offering new goods and services and (b) reducing costs on the existing list of goods and services.
3) complicated organization of business processes, which leads to an increase and intensification of specialization. The result of activity of a specific manufacturing chain is a range of partial or individual operations. At present, major organizations outsource these operations, allowing them to economize on their own management expenses.
4) entrepreneurial initiative. A rise in the dynamic and instability of markets make entrepreneurial initiative an increasingly significant factor. The more developed the entrepreneurial culture is, the higher is the readiness to take risks and show initiative.
5) globalization of the economy. It must be noted that there is a difference between the process of internationalization and the process of globalization. Internationalization means the development of export and import, and national manufactures of one country entering the domestic market of another country. But manufacture still remains primarily national. In globalization, there is a fragmentation of the entire technological cycle into individual stages, which are distributed between separate, legally independent organizations that are located in different countries. To ensure the precise functioning of these technological chains, coordination of the activity of all participants needs to be established, which is impossible without modern information and communications technology (hereinafter ICT), based on computers and the Internet. Introducing ICT facilitates: (a) changing the nature of the use and the economic application of knowledge;
(b) increasing the role and the nature of innovations; They increasingly
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apply not only to manufacturing technologies, but also planning and design;
(c) the segregation and increased significance of general organization and management functions. There is intense specialization of these functions. Along with general functions of planning and coordination of manufacturing activity, the functions of marketing, branding, management of financial flows etc. arise. All this requires specific "market knowledge”, which makes it possible to turn "common knowledge” not only into a good, but a factor of manufacture on the global market. With the help of ICT, knowledge that is produced in the scientific and education sphere, and also in the sector of intellectual services, enters traditional industries, and drastically raises their effectiveness.
6) the significant supply of “common knowledge”, and the lack of “market knowledge” of the highly-qualified and relatively cheap workforce. In at atmosphere of increasing technological inferiority, new manufacture technologies come into being. However, there are few examples of introducing modern organizational, management and marketing technologies. The demand for special "market knowledge” is often not realized because of a weak competitive environment and a lack of sufficient stimuli to development. The deficit of "market knowledge” is linked with the severe collapse of manufacture of consumer goods in the 1990s, when national manufacturers were not even able to ensure a supply of products on the domestic market. This economic crisis led to the development of "shuttle trade”, which not only aided the swift saturation of the consumer market, but served as a kind of school for Russian "shuttle traders”.
7) the “crisis of trust” in the state and business partners. This can be explained by the difficult history of relations between business and the state in Russia, as the state has traditionally crushed private initiative. So entrepreneurial activity mainly manifested itself not in legal business, but in inventing ways to avoid state control. Furthermore, an organization that is not certain whether an employee who underwent re-training at the organization’s expense will continue to work there in future does not wish to invest in training and re-training of personnel. It hires new employees with a higher level of education and qualifications.
8) the lack of demand for personnel with a high professional level of education during the present financial crisis, which has "paralyzed” the system of financial and economic institutions, and which has led to mass cutbacks of staff employed in these spheres of activity. At present, the following situation can be seen: (a) lack of personnel with
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technical education, and above all personnel of specialized fields of work; (b) the formation of an entire "army” of unemployed people with high professional level of knowledge in fields that are not relevant in the present economic conditions. An imbalance has been created in the system of "building up professional knowledge”.
Therefore, a well-thought-out economic mechanism for organizing the system of professional training of production personnel is required on the basis of: (a) optimal combination of different forms of training for new employees, re-training and teaching workers a second profession; (b) raising the qualification and level of knowledge of workers and specialists, taking into account the dynamic changes in the economy, technology and production organization, in close connection with their individual professional qualification advancement. Some people believe that in selecting a special field and re-training on a new special field, young people should focus on studying a field that is "unfashionable” at present, as this field will be relevant and in demand in 3-5 years; (c) organizing high-quality training and re-training of personnel in new and competitive fields in future;
(d) constant adaptation of the workforce to changing conditions throughout their entire active working life, as part of both formal and informal education.
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