Engineers are crossed out from the Red Book – Newspaper Kommersant No. 64 (7509) dated 04/13/2023

The shortage of engineering workers needed in construction, transport and industry, which Russian employers talk about, can be exaggerated. This follows from the analysis of labor market macrostatistics conducted by the Higher School of Economics. The number of people employed in industries where engineers are most often in demand has been declining over the past 10 years, while the employment of such specialists, on the contrary, has remained approximately at the same level.

The shortage of engineering personnel in the Russian labor market, which Russian employers claim, may be imaginary. This conclusion can be drawn from the report that was presented in March of this year at the seminar of the Higher School of Business of the Higher School of Economics by Professor of the Department of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management Elena Varshavskaya. The report is based on data from federal observation of the employment of graduates who have received secondary vocational and higher education, data from Rosstat. Under the “workers of engineering specialties” in the work refers to all those who have received higher education in engineering and technical profile.

Recall that over the past year, Russian companies have increasingly begun to say that they are faced with a shortage of personnel. Representatives of various industries complained about the shortage, but most often such statements were made by representatives of the industrial sector, interviewed by experts from the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy (for more details, see Kommersant of November 11, 2022). However, as follows from Elena Varshavskaya’s report, these data hardly reflect an objective picture of the distribution of engineering personnel in the Russian labor market. Employer surveys, the paper notes, do not always agree with the results of assessing the supply-demand ratio at the macro level and often overestimate the shortage of personnel, primarily describing the situation with the search for employees for hard-to-fill vacancies. An alternative way to assess the shortage of personnel is based on labor market indicators and takes into account the level and dynamics of employment and unemployment by occupational groups, changes in the relative salaries of workers, the number of vacancies and their correlation with the number of unemployed, as well as indicators of hours worked.

Macro-level statistics call into question the validity of the allegations of a shortage of engineering personnel, follows from the report. Thus, the total supply of labor force with a higher engineering and technical education in Russia has grown by 13% since 2010, from 6.1 million to 6.9 million people, because numerous cohorts of workers entered the labor market, and, on the contrary, small ones left. . At the same time, the indicator of aggregated demand for engineers, at least, did not increase, but most likely shrank. The number of people employed in the manufacturing sector, primarily in industry, as well as in construction, transport and communications, where the main demand for the labor of engineering and technical specialists, decreased by 710 thousand people in 2000–2019. In addition, in 2010–2020, the employment rate of engineers (90–91% for men) corresponded to the employment rate of other professionals with higher education, which also refutes the thesis about the shortage of engineering personnel. Finally, the labor market success rates of engineering graduates differ little from those of, for example, economics graduates. As a result, Elena Varshavskaya concludes, the problem of the shortage of engineering specialists, which employers insistently talk about, is not related to the lack of supply and cannot be solved by increasing the scale of their training.

The “imaginary” shortage of engineering personnel can also explain the modest dynamics of wages in this industry – while statistics, despite employers’ statements about a shortage of personnel, do not record a sharp increase in salary offers for such workers, experts do not expect their significant growth by the end of this year (more see Kommersant of March 27). It should be noted that in the future, the data of the report of the Higher School of Economics could also become the basis for a new approach to the redistribution of places in universities in accordance with the needs of the labor market – now the Ministry of Labor is trying to “link” them within the framework of a new federal program to support youth employment.

Anastasia Manuylova