Summing up of 11 months of the passing year, the State Employment Service of Ukraine has recorded 104 000 vacant posts within the country. In comparison with the same period of 2016 there was a positive tendency: an increase in the number of new vacancies accounted for 11%. The simulated positivity of this tendency – a rise in the number of workplaces in the country that experiences a severe economic depression – cannot but amuse us – more and more relevant becomes a problem of lack of highly-skilled workers at the national labour market. First of all, it refers to technical specializations. Thus, if to analyze the structure of vacancies according to professional groups, the largest demand – 22% – is for skilled workers with a tool, 21% – for equipment and machine maintenance and exploitation workers. The founder of the industrial investment group “Aurum Group” Alona Lebedieva analyzed the specifics of modern Ukrainian labour market, using the example of her own company and explaining the historical roots of existing problems and possible solutions, exclusively for Mind.

These statistics, though not fully, but still reflect a serious problem for many industrial enterprises of the country – an acute shortage of skilled staff of technical specialization. It refers to both specialists with a higher education – design engineers – and with specialization – turners, millers and welders. For example, one of our manufacturing companies has employed 30 people to work in a foundry this year and dismissed 29; 8 people in a machine-assembly shop and 10 have resigned.

Roots of the problem

We are almost always on the lookout for employees for such vacancies as a turner, miller, travelling crane operator, welder, setting-up equipment electrician, metal-cutting equipment repairman etc. And this shortage, in my opinion, is caused by several reasons:

Immense prestige of higher education among young generation. Ukraine is the country where more than 70% of population have a higher education, although every second graduate works in the field not related to their degree.

The prestige of blue-collar jobs was damaged since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, nowadays vocational institutions are attended either because of frustration or unwillingness to study. And the latter is a determinant, as such a demotivated person cannot be taught to work well from the beginning.

Besides, such an imbalance in favour of higher education is a result of inefficiency of national education system that has existed for many years, and which, unfortunately, lived its own life, making it comprehensible only to itself.

Occupational guidance for young people is poorly performed. Schoolchildren are not well-informed about modern specializations which are on demand and they traditionally join the ranks of lawyers, economists and accountants. The correlation between the education system and business needs is rather low nowadays.

Long-term state underfunding of vocational education system led to the fact that business was forced to make its own investments in training of skilled workers for itself within vocational institutions.

However, the practice has shown that there are disadvantages of such cooperation. Inflexible and “trapped in the past” teachers of vocational institutions, weak material and technical resources and old-fashioned teaching approaches meant that the qualification received by students did not comply with modern requirements of industrial enterprises.

And this is a serious problem for business, as a young specialist who came to work at the factory should be trained on-site once more, taking into account the specifics of the enterprise. Therefore, large manufacturing companies refused to finance vocational institutions and came up with an alternative solution to open their own educational centres.

Skilled workers eventually choose lighter physical workloads or leave the profession and start to do business.

Lack of social security. In the Soviet Union one of the instruments of employee retention was an internal social infrastructure, which satisfied main needs of employees regarding advanced training, recreation, accommodation etc. Nowadays, business, despite its wish, cannot subsidize the social sphere: in fact, almost all the profit is reinvested in production modernization and improvement of material and technical resources of the enterprise by shareholders.

Solutions to the problems

Since the current year a dual-channel funding of vocational institutions has been implemented: from state and local budgets. Thus, the government planned to return money in full from state orders for workers training through a subvention from the state budget with an emphasis on scarce jobs.

And the question of the level of funding for required exactly for this region specialists was absolutely logically delegated to local councils and is being solved there now. This is a good initiative, which should be actively developed and maintained, attracting both business and professional associations. It cannot be overlooked. In fact, this is an opportunity to build a new modern system of vocational education, the requester of which will be business itself.

Nowadays, the majority of chemical, machine building, viz. railcar building and roundhouse servicing enterprises, which are created by cities, are often the main employers for the population. Therefore, the level of development of these enterprises has a direct influence on the welfare of thousands of families and, in fact, determines their lifestyle. Thus, we realize that production becomes more and more automated but a rail car cannot be built without a worker, therefore the question of restoring the prestige of blue-collar jobs is still relevant and requires a detailed evaluation by business and state.

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