From 2024, Russians will be able to retrain for free in a profession that is a priority for the economy.

From 2024, all Russians, regardless of their labor status, will be able to undergo free retraining if they want to acquire a profession that is a priority for the Russian economy, follows from the draft amendments to the federal program “Employment Promotion” prepared by the Ministry of Labor. It is expected that this list will include about 150 professions, most of which will be related to industrial production. It is this industry, as Kommersant previously wrote, that is now experiencing the greatest shortage of personnel.

The Ministry of Labor is expanding the retraining program for citizens within the framework of the federal project “Employment Promotion” of the national project “Demography” – a draft government resolution on this was published on the regulation.gov.ru portal. Let us recall that in 2021, when the government launched the federal project, it was assumed that the opportunity to acquire a new profession would be in demand, since at that time the risks of unemployment were relatively high: if at the end of 2019 there were about 3.4 million unemployed in the country, then by the end In 2020, there were already 4.4 million, and the unemployment rate increased from 4.6% to 5.9% of the economically active population.

Initially, the priority categories for retraining were people over 50 years of age, women with small children and people with disabilities, but gradually the number of categories began to grow. According to the Ministry of Labor, by the end of 2022, 190 thousand people took advantage of the opportunity; as a result of training, 150 thousand people found work in a new profession or became entrepreneurs. In total, more than 500 thousand people underwent retraining during the project. Currently, over 24 thousand educational programs are available to applicants.

Now the retraining project is awaiting a fundamentally new stage, which will make it possible to involve significantly more people in vocational education – and transform it from a tool to combat unemployment into a source of labor in scarce specialties, which corresponds to the demands of the labor market: for example, since the end of 2022, Russian employers have regularly announced about the shortage of various personnel. First of all, they complain about the lack of specialized professions for industry and line personnel for the retail sector (for more details, see Kommersant of October 27). The overall unemployment rate in the Russian Federation, according to Rosstat, dropped to a historical low of 2.9%.

The new edition of the regulation on the implementation of measures to organize vocational training and additional vocational education for certain categories of citizens assumes that any citizen will be able to apply for retraining at employment centers, regardless of labor status. The main selection criterion is the desire to obtain one of the priority specialties for economics. The government will separately approve their list at the beginning of 2024 – according to a Kommersant source in the White House, it will include about 150 professions, mostly related to industrial production.

Those wishing to acquire a new profession will be offered to undergo vocational testing to understand what set of skills they possess, and to enter into a tripartite agreement with the employment center and a specific employer who will be ready to hire the graduate. According to Kommersant’s interlocutor in the government, the Ministry of Labor expects that approximately 50 thousand people will come to retrain under such conditions in 2024. The program budget for next year, we recall, is more than 7.9 billion rubles; it is not yet clear whether the emergence of a new category of retraining will require additional funds.

Let us note that now, in many respects, the function that the state is ready to take on is performed by corporate educational projects. In 2023, we recall that their budgets increased by about 20%, although they remained virtually unchanged as a share of the payroll (for more details, see Kommersant on November 30). Prospects for further growth are not obvious – as the number of people retraining at the expense of the state expands, the need for businesses to invest in personnel themselves may decrease, which generally corresponds to a larger trend towards the redistribution of an increasing number of resources received from corporate profits, often through situational targeted levies like windfall tax .

At the same time, the authorities make it clear that digitalization allows them to assess the volume of company profits, their sources – and the degree of fairness of this redistribution; however, often the expansion of state participation in the economy provokes competition between officials and corporations in areas where they did not previously overlap. As a result, against the backdrop of an increase in government social benefits and wages, corporations have to more actively participate in the race of salary offers; in the context of a shortage of workers, public and private employment services compete for the right to bring the last Russian unemployed to employers, and vocational education systems – to give them professions in short supply – and in that Given that this activity is paid for simultaneously from both state and corporate budgets, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a rational grain.

Anastasia Manuilova, Oleg Sapozhkov