The economy needs ready-made professionals from the education system, not graduates - Deputy Minister

More than half of Russian school graduates go to colleges and technical schools after 9th grade. In the conditions of industrial reorientation towards domestic production, yesterday's schoolchildren should acquire professional skills directly at enterprises, so as not to wait for the introduction of new standards in education.

This was discussed at the plenary session “Anti-crisis guidelines: where to get personnel for import substitution and technological breakthrough?” First Deputy Minister of Education of the Russian Federation Alexander Bugaev said at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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“We see an explosive growth of interest in the system of secondary vocational education,” he noted. – In 2020, 60% of school graduates went to technical school after 9th grade, and a significant portion went to technical school after 11th grade. These are challenges from the point of view that the system must match the quality of training to the real sector of the economy.”

In addition to modernizing classrooms and the material base of the secondary vocational education system, it is necessary to introduce new standards and training programs. But the bureaucratic procedure is such that as long as they are approved by the Ministry of Education, they will either become obsolete or there will be no need for such specialists.

“Career guidance at school is important,” says the deputy minister. “An important project on engineering classes has been launched so that school graduates are ready to become students in aircraft and shipbuilding. The sooner we start, the better it turns out. Not to mention such things as the Roscosmos or Rosatom classes, which also already exist. It's important to understand trends. The trend for the development of the vocational education system is a request for a specific profession. First, the guys receive a specific living profession, and then, if they are ripe, they go to get a higher education. The state’s task is to ensure that children receive the profession that production and producers specifically need.”

Often, according to the deputy minister, schoolchildren choose their future profession unconsciously, enrolling where the enrollment is smaller or where their friends are enrolling. This leads to the state investing in the training of a specialist who will not work in his profession. Therefore, along with a high-quality basic set of knowledge and a set of subjects that will allow you to navigate life and change your profession more than once, it is necessary to conduct career guidance at school so that the future graduate makes his choice consciously.

It’s even better when he sees a real prospect of using the acquired specialty. As Boris Korobets, acting rector of the Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU), said, for several years the university could not recruit students for the biotechnology training program. And just this year, all recruitment targets were met thanks to collaboration with a group of nutritional supplement companies.

“We identified an industrial partner who gave an order for people and competencies,” noted the head of the university. – Not all graduates will go to work there, but the guys who chose this direction know exactly their area where they will work. As a result, we closed the enrollment with a very good score in this area. The guys understood why they would go to university, what they would learn there, and what they would do after that.

Defending the university development program, I argued that every department must have an industrial partner. We are now moving in this direction; each department must have a clear and understandable order from the employer. None of our conservative habits and stories about obligatory and optional discipline bother him. Not only from the university’s point of view, but from the regulatory point of view, we need to change the program to push the university to work more flexibly with employers.”