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Unemployment via... education

How to redress an imbalance in the system of professional training

Photo by Mykhailo MARKIV

Experts are increasingly worried over a new threat to Ukraine and the competitiveness of its economy. According to the Ministry of Labor, almost a third of this country’s gainfully employed population has not received a proper professional training, and 12 percent do not even know what secondary education is. On top of this bleak picture is quite a high percentage of unemployment among prestigious professions and a disastrous shortage of working hands at industrial enterprises.

Oleksii Miroshnychenko, Vice President of the Confederation of Ukrainian Employers, believes that an imbalance in the system of staff training is the main cause of this trouble. The state annually allots millions-worth funds for budget- supported education, but in reality the latter tends to be aimed at training degree-holding specialists whom nobody needs. For example, 44 percent of economics graduates have to go to job centers immediately after completing a university course. The same lot befalls liberal arts and law graduates.

The root cause is absence of a true-to-life nationwide forecast of workforce requirements. “If this is not taken into account, the economy will be seriously unbalanced. Our information says that 80 percent of the labor market is interested in factory workers and only 20 percent in specialists with higher education.,” Miroshnychenko concludes. So he advises that this kind of forecast be made as soon as possible. Besides, one should broaden the knowledge given to young workers, which may be sort of occupational insurance for them. On the one hand, this will raise the worker’s professional level and make him/her more competitive and, on the other hand, will let him/her earn more.

Miroshnychenko suggests such viable measures as increasing the share of the enterprise’s wages fund, which is used for the training of workers (now 3 percent). He thinks that the current financial plans do not allow enterprises to make full use of foreign training options, courses of study, and other forms of professional upgrading. The expert is also pinning hopes on a new system of demands to those employed in every concrete sector. For example, it is planned to spell out standards in the National System of Classification, although the latter is still in the pipeline. But there are role models. This mechanism was set into motion a year ago in the European Union. Their “qualification framework” allows comparing and seeing differences in the diplomas of employees from every EU member state. As a result, they can trace the true level of a certain specialist’s training.

Experts also note such causes of the staff-placement crisis as surplus of workforce in one region and its shortage in another. In other countries, this difference is corrected by means of inland migration. But this approach is so far impossible in Ukraine. Owing to the absence of a well-developed transport infrastructure and to an imperfect services sector, the Ukrainian job-seeker cannot travel, say, 300 kilometers every day to his/her place of work, as his/her foreign counterpart may be doing.

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