Within the framework of a public-private partnership a private company will allot two million hryvnias for the preparation of potential chemistry students.
According to preliminary estimates, this year about 191,000 students graduated from high schools, while in 2010 there were 340,000. Having received their school-leaving certificates, the former students started thinking about colleges and a good job in the future. This is a tough nut to crack. According to experts over a half of graduates’ first jobs do not correspond to their qualifications.
“The problem is more than topical,” Rodion Kolyshko, director of the department for labor potential development at the Employers Confederation of Ukraine tells The Day. “A person spends over five years of his or her life without any guarantee to be employed in their field.” Having obtained an education, young people often face a situation when their specialization is not needed on the job market. “Unfortunately, this problem keeps getting worse,” he adds. Those whose employment corresponds to their specialization are a minority, he says. In order to find a job they must distinguish themselves in other ways. According to very approximate estimates, Kolyshko says, which vary depending on specialty and profession, no more than 20 percent of graduates find employment in their field. A science graduate (for example, an engineer), according to him, has more chances than someone who majored in the humanities (political scientist, lawyer or economist).
According to the estimates of the director general of GRS Ukraine Maksym Nemysh, after graduation about 60-70 percent of students do not work in their field. At this, the study Employer of the Year for Students, which the company held in November 2010, uncovered an interesting fact: as many as 28.2 percent of the young people surveyed doubt that their search for their first job after graduation will be successful.
Young people connect their work ambitions with higher education, which will bring them higher salaries and status, Yurii Kuzovoi, director of the department for social insurance development at the Employers Federation of Ukraine, tells The Day. But the market will not satisfy the ambitions of everyone as there are few vacancies.
“They continue to be educated as financiers and economists while the country needs workers in the production or niche professional spheres,” Nemysh told The Day.
According to Kuzovoi, young people don’t want to be workers. At the very least they will consent to being an engineer (when dealing with a technical profession). It’s even better to be an economist, an accountant, a manager, etc. “The popularity of labor professions — turner, stonemason and others — is much lower” he says. However, the expert continues, today one can’t say that a turner at a plant makes less than a budget sphere worker. And he has numbers to back up his words. For example, an average salary in early April 2011 in industry was about 3,000 hryvnias, in the state governance sector (due to salary reductions and benefit cuts) it decreased to 2,777 hryvnias, in education it is 1,940 hryvnias, and in health it is a mere 1,693 hryvnias. The financial sphere is the only one to outdo industry with 5,233 hryvnias. That is why young people want to be financiers, he sums up.
The cost of their poor choices is not just borne by students but also by enterprises. If there are no professional workers, the enterprise has to find an adequate substitute, retrain them — to spend a lot of money and time, Nemysh says.
Therefore, in the opinion of experts surveyed by The Day, this problem should be solved in a comprehensive manner. One should start with the renewal of professional standards — a kind of specialty card, which determines the system of skills of a higher educational establishment graduate. Then one should renew the system of production practices, renew logistical support for educational establishments, make a prognosis of the demand on the job market and compare it to other national indicators. It is also important to involve business in the development of education through the mechanism of public-private partnership.
The ministry responsible for this has started to work on the latter point. During the first sitting of the Council of Domestic and Foreign Investors at the Ministry of Education and Science, Youth and Sport of Ukraine (created to involve foreign and Ukrainian investors in ensuring the development of education and science) a partnership agreement between the biggest chemical company of Ukraine (the group of companies Group DF) and the Ministry of Education and Science was signed. The private company agreed to buy new equipment for the training and preparation of Ukrainian teams for the international chemistry Olympiad, and also to finance an additional winter convention of the Ukrainian team. “We plan to spend about two million hryvnias on supporting chemistry education in schools in 2011-12. I think it’s a good start and want to encourage other entrepreneurs in Ukraine to think of the future and invest in the development of education,” Dmytro Firtash, the head of the board of directors of Group DF and of the United Employers Movement of Ukraine, stated.
“We would like to involve the private capital of business circles representatives in creating more possibilities for the realization of scientific and technical priority directions in their final stages,” Dmytro Tabachnyk, minister of education and science, youth and sport of Ukraine added after the signing of the agreement. According to him, besides the Employers Federation of Ukraine, talks about public-private partnerships in education is ongoing with the Ukrainian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the company SKM, the All-Ukrainian Association of Bakers, the association Ukrlehprom and others. It is planned that experts from these organizations will be involved in determining state purchases, the organization of production, and the preparation of professional and educational standards.
