Employers are complaining: Ukrainian university graduates need to be taught again after they have received a degree. At the same time, university rectors argue that they lack money to purchase the equipment and train instructors who know about industrial innovations and can train specialists of the level the employers need. Add to this the ineffective system of governmental orders, which produces specialists most of whom then fail to be employed at state-run businesses for lack of jobs. This obviously makes it imperative for employers, educationalists, and officials to meet and negotiate the kind of specialists to be trained, the ways of doing so, and the sources of funding this.
“First of all, business should try to affect higher education’s rules of the game. There have been some successful examples of this: the state order procedure was changed and employers’ opinion was taken into account. The year 2011 saw a new framework qualification introduced for many specialties, which paved the way to the European space and standards – and employers took an active part in drawing it up,” says Svitlana KALASHNIKOVA, first deputy director of the Higher Education Research Institute affiliated to the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences.
“SCHOLARSHIPS AND COMPETITIONS ARE A GOOD OPTION FOR MEDIUM- AND SMALL-SCALE COMPANIES”
Big companies address in different ways the problem of the insufficient skill of Ukrainian university graduates. Some are setting up sort of remedial classes at their own companies, where young specialists are additionally taught what is necessary – from how to hold talks and prepare presentations to how to operate the company’s programs. Others prefer such thing as scholarships and grants for the students who attract employers as future employees. But there are also instances when companies directly cooperate with universities by offering their experts as lecturers, installing the equipment in laboratories, and funding in-service training of the teaching staff.
“The chief problem that we see in the training of technical specialists is a gap between universities’ logistical base and the market’s requirements. So, under an agreement with Kyiv Polytechnic University, we installed in their laboratory the equipment we use at our enterprises,” says Oleh BARDIAK, a PR expert at the Ukrainian company ABB. “Naturally, the teacher who must do ten laboratory tests and who has never worked with this equipment, will be unable to do so. Therefore, we have conducted a cycle of training sessions for the teaching and research staff.”
Scholarships and competitions are a good option for medium- and small-scale companies because they are aimed at achieving the result today – to choose and employ the best students. Businesspeople themselves explain their interest in this form of work by an unpredictable economic situation in this country. As a result, only those who stand firmly on their two feet can guarantee that they will need 20 specialists within five years in one sector and five more in another.
ASSISTANT CONSULTANTS OR CUSTOMERS?
Yet most of the companies’ methods cannot solve the overall problem of the quality of young staff training. Rodion KOLYSHKO, director of the Labor Force Development Department of the Ukrainian Employers Federation, believes that lack of structuralization is the main problem in the relationship between business and education. Companies have not yet chosen the role to play in the relationship – who are they, assistant consultants or customers? If they are customers, they should, accordingly, pay for the training of a real specialist for their organization.
“Small- and medium-scale business should jointly tackle this problem and speak out. A sole enterprise cannot create a high-quality program, but if they rally together, they will be able offer both money and ideas,” Kolyshko explains. “Another way to change something is to impact the state by way of association and cooperation with educational institutions. There are no other options. And all kinds of scholarships are an effective but fragmentary mechanism for changing the situation. How many students will get a scholarship? Maybe, one or hundreds, but it is a drop in the ocean for a country in which thousands are students at different-level educational institutions.”
Although universities agree that a link with the labor market is important, they add that this should be within reasonable limits. Business is not always aware of the universities’ problems, but, naturally enough, it is trying to promote its vector and turn a state-run educational institution into a corporate one.
“Business is toying with the idea of promoting the so-called soft skills. But how many people will they be able to employ then? Fifty at most. Another problem is of an ideological nature: employers often take a consumerist approach. For example, IT businesses claim that it is necessary to increase the governmental demand for this kind of students, but is it the state or business that needs these graduates?” asks Volodymyr BUHROV, Pro-Reactor for Education at the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv. “The worst thing is that the state is not interested in regulating the relationship between employers and education.”
WHO IS GOING TO WORK IN THE INDUSTRY?
Yet university representatives themselves admit that it is very difficult – due to red tape in the whole educational machine – to introduce even the simplest changes which employers are prepared to finance. “On the one hand, state ownership is a good thing, but, on the other, it is not flexible enough, and any step must be reflected in the teaching plans. And, to get the latter approved, you must go through a lot of stages and obtain a go-ahead at the ministry. Only then can you get down to implementing an innovation,” Kolyshko points out.
Employers explain that the problem is not in the fact that graduates do not always know enough to work at a company but in the fact that it is difficult to find the young people who wish to study and then work in the industry. According to Kateryna BIELOVA, project manager at the Personnel and Social Policy Directorate of the company Metinvest, a mere 20 percent of schoolchildren are planning to opt for an industrial specialty, with only 20 percent of the latter wishing to work in the industry thereafter.
