Starting from 2024, the government will begin to annually calculate the needs of the labor market for five years in advance.

Starting in 2024, the government will begin issuing a forecast on personnel requirements for the Russian economy. The corresponding instruction was given by Vladimir Putin during a meeting of the State Council (see also page 3). The practice exists in many countries, but personnel forecasts are rarely fully realized, in addition, in the Russian Federation there is a lack of data on some segments of the labor market.

Starting in 2024, the government will begin annually preparing a five-year forecast for the personnel needs of the Russian economy. Vladimir Putin announced this yesterday at a meeting of the State Council Presidium dedicated to labor market issues. The President emphasized that the meeting of the State Council “is taking place against the backdrop of record low unemployment,” and called this indicator one of the most important for assessing “the effectiveness of our entire economic policy and its social dimension.” He also noted a decrease in youth unemployment as a result of a “special government program,” although it still exceeds the average for the entire population. At the same time, he noted that a low unemployment rate could result in a labor shortage for the Russian economy: “We know that such a problem already exists. And we must take this factor into account and respond to the long term.”

The government will have to begin forming a five-year forecast of personnel needs at the level of the entire economy, as well as in the context of specific regions, industries and professions as early as 2024. “It is on this basis that we will now calculate the parameters for training personnel with secondary and higher vocational education,” the president said. “A modern convenient mechanism” will allow us to take into account national projects, infrastructure programs, prospects for the development of territories, and investment plans of state corporations.

In the future, said the head of the Ministry of Labor Anton Kotyakov, the forecast could become the main guideline in determining the target numbers for admission in all areas of vocational training, this will make it possible to “neutralize the risks of unsatisfied demand for labor.” Additionally, the ministry proposes to detail the admission quota for targeted training in higher education programs, assigning 90% of it to the needs of specific enterprises.

Nowadays, personnel forecasts at the state level are formed in many countries, but the more detailed they are, the lower their predictive value, says Rostislav Kapelyushnikov, deputy head of the Human Resources Center at the Higher School of Economics. “In addition, even macro forecasts are regularly wrong. Who, for example, could have predicted the economic crisis of 2008 or assessed in advance the impact of the coronavirus pandemic?” – notes the economist. The personnel forecast can serve as a guideline for the development of the state education system, argues Viktor Lyashok, a senior researcher at the Laboratory for Research on Labor Markets and Pension Systems at INSAP RANEPA. At the same time, he admits, there are several sources of data on the Russian labor market and not all of them can be combined into a single picture. “There are survey data collected by Rosstat, there is administrative data from the Social Fund, and each type has its own shortcomings. In addition, part of the Russian labor market – for example, informal workers or migrants – is poorly reflected in both places,” he states. Note that migration and informal employment in the labor market often act as a damper for fluctuations in supply and demand, but historically this mechanism has always been ensured by the high attractiveness of the Russian Federation for migrants from Central Asia, which is not at all guaranteed in the changing conditions of foreign trade of the Russian Federation.

Anastasia Manuilova