The government discussed a new national project for the Russian labor market

A new national project “Personnel” will be launched in the Russian Federation in 2025, and during this year the government must formulate its goals and tools for achieving them. The main priority, as follows from preliminary statements by officials, will be the integration of the needs of the labor market and the capabilities of the education system. Both employers and trade unions recognize the priority of solving this problem.

The government has begun to form the structure of the new national project “Personnel” – its launch is scheduled for January 1, 2025. Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova announced this on Monday during a meeting of the open interdepartmental working group “Personnel: Time of Opportunities.” Let us remind you that Vladimir Putin announced the launch of this new national project in the Russian Federation in his message to the Federal Assembly on February 29. “We are forming it together with our colleagues from trade unions, from employers,” emphasized Tatyana Golikova. According to her, the structure of the new national project will also depend on the content of the labor force forecast for the near future. The need to formulate such a forecast, which would describe in detail the personnel needs of the economy for various specialists, was also announced in September by Vladimir Putin at a meeting of the State Council. According to the Ministry of Labor, the forecast will create long-term personnel guidelines for universities, employers and the regulator.

In the meantime, the government is focusing on the personnel forecast of the Ministry of Economy – according to the department’s calculations, by 2030 there will be 2.4 million more jobs in the Russian Federation than now, some of them will flow from industry to industry. “First of all, we see that the greatest need for personnel will be in enterprises and industries in the real sector. This is manufacturing – in this area we see plus 800 thousand jobs,” said Minister of Labor and Social Protection Anton Kotyakov yesterday. In addition, according to him, 400 thousand jobs will appear in the transportation sector, almost 450 thousand in IT and research activities, and more than 280 thousand in health care and social services.

As follows from the speeches of officials, the priority of the new national project will be to meet the personnel needs of employers – the unemployment rate, which was a problem previously, is steadily decreasing in the Russian Federation. “We see systemic changes in the labor market that have been taking place recently. In six years, our unemployment rate has decreased by 20%. The average annual number of employed people was 73.6 million people,” recalled Tatyana Golikova. In terms of youth unemployment, as Anton Kotyakov said, there is also a “confident downward trend” in the Russian Federation. “If in the cohort of 15–29 years old at the end of 2020 we had an unemployment rate of 10.7%, then at the end of the third quarter of 2023 we saw significant levels of 7%. That is, a decrease of almost a third… in three years,” he said.

One of the tools that, according to the head of the Ministry of Labor, can become part of the new national project is a system of rating institutions of higher and secondary vocational education based on the employment and salary level of graduates as an indicator of “their demand in the labor market.” The Ministry of Labor is developing it jointly with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Education; the departments plan to present the system by the end of the year.

As follows from the statements of employers and employees, in general they agree with the White House’s choice of priority for the national project. “A systematic approach to developing common approaches to the problem of staff shortages in enterprises has long been needed. There are individual solutions, and often quite successful, such as the project of engineering schools, but they exist in the status of pilots, and a national scale is needed,” notes the head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Alexander Shokhin. The last year and a half have convincingly demonstrated that the problem of a shortage of personnel for the economy is absolutely real, agrees Deputy Chairman of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions Alexander Shershukov. At the same time, he emphasizes, in order to create a high-quality national project, it is necessary to seriously work on the personnel forecast, linking it with the demographic and economic development of the country.

Anastasia Manuilova