There is a considerable imbalance on the Ukrainian labor market. While employers face an acute shortage of specialists in certain fields, higher educational institutions are providing training in absolutely different specialties. For example, supply in the economic, legal, and liberal arts fields already exceeds employers’ demands.
The reason is all too obvious: work in these fields is more prestigious and lucrative. Current graduates also think it is better to acquire professions with fashionable and promising titles. This has brought about a situation where universities are often guided exclusively by applicants’ wishes, leading them to create “fashionable” departments that are in demand and to train specialists on a mass scale. This may affect not just the quality of education: even the best honors degree may be of no use whatsoever. Statistics indicate that almost one-half of Ukrainian university and college graduates with prestigious diplomas are expanding the ranks of the unemployed. Only 31.5 percent of graduates between the ages of 15 and 24 are employed in Ukraine.
Even abroad, Ukrainian applicants are mostly offered liberal arts courses. For instance, international education councils at the US Embassy offer numerous programs to perfect students’ knowledge of English, French, and other languages at US universities. At the same time, employers need people with less exalted specialties, and skilled factory workers are in particular demand. “These are construction and industrial workers as well as salespeople,” The Day was told by Leonid Shayan, director of Kyiv’s job center. He also named such scarce specialists as production engineers, design engineers, highly skilled programmers, top- and medium-level executives, accountants, and sales specialists.
Almost six months ago the Ministry of Labor and Social Policies and the Ministry of Education signed an agreement to coordinate their actions and at least partly correct the current imbalance. To find out how this problem is being addressed at universities and colleges, The Day approached the heads of these ministries at the exhibition “Contemporary Education in Ukraine-2006” held recently in Kyiv’s Sports Palace.
The exhibit, aimed at informing the public about the latest trends in the field of education, featured a large number of educational institutions from all over Ukraine. It turns out that most universities are unaware of the agreement with the Ministry of Labor. Still, college and university rectors know about the current situation on the employment market and have been trying to solve the problem by themselves. For example, Odesa National Polytechnic University, supported by the regional job center, holds annual “career fairs” that gather 115 companies. According to Associate Professor Oleksiy Pavlov, who teaches at the Department of Electronic and Computer Technologies and heads the Career Center, they also regulate the number of applicants admitted: at the demand of the Ministry of Education, the institution has reduced the number of places for liberal arts students, increased the quota for science students, and is closely watching labor market trends.
“We are trying to address labor market requirements when we admit new students or establish new departments,” says Tetiana Sytnykova, teaching methods laboratory assistant at Zaporizhia National Technical University. “We explain to the students what specialty will net them a job and what will be in demand in five years.” Poltava National Technical University also regularly monitors regional demand for specialists in crucial fields.
Other universities, including private ones, are also applying the same method. At European University they have already understood that training specialists whom no one needs is unprofitable. Yet all these measures have produced little success: school-leavers and their parents still yearn to gain admittance to law and economics departments in the sincere belief that they (or their children) will be able to find a job. There is no integrated approach in sight to solving this problem, which means that the situation will not change any time soon.
The Ministry of Labor and Social Policies told The Day that it is now drafting a law on involving employers in staff training and retraining. The law will stipulate the procedure by which the Ministry of Labor and the Trade Union Federation will submit demands, including the number and specialization of graduates. The document is now under ministerial scrutiny.
A similar problem also exists abroad. Mykhailo Zahyrniak, rector of Kremenchuk State Technological University, says that he noticed the same trend in various US universities, where he worked for five years. Science departments usually consist of representatives of ethnic minorities and immigrants’ children rather than US-born Americans, who are opting for the same professions as their Ukrainian peers, which indicates that the technological specialties indispensable to all countries clearly lack prestige.
Greece, however, does not have this problem. According to Konstantina Gouvatsou, PR manager at the Association of Greek Private Higher Educational Institutions, which was represented at the exhibition “Modern Education in Ukraine-2006,” there is no imbalance between liberal arts and science specialists on the Greek labor market.
