There is no one to work in Russia: there is a catastrophic shortage of qualified specialists

Famine still reached Russia. Personnel … This is the conclusion reached by the staff of the Institute of Economic Policy. Gaidar (IEP), having polled the heads of 1,000 enterprises last month. 34% of them reported a record shortage of qualified personnel since 1996. Researchers recorded a special force majeure in the light industry.

Actually, the results of the survey do not open any America. Where will the staff come from (who, as you know, decide everything), if for decades since the beginning of reforms in the country there has been no state policy of training specialists?

In the “dashing 90s” in Russia, vocational schools were massively closed, working professions became unpopular. The real human happiness for young people was to get on the podium or get the position of a municipal official.

Generally speaking, the man himself, whose name IEP bears, played an important role here. The ideology advocated by Yegor Gaidar: the market will put everything in its place by itself, and why do we need our own miserable industry if the West will sell quality and cheaper goods? That’s how it all happened.

But now we have an import substitution program and a large shortage of personnel, which, according to the IEP, hold back the industrial growth of Russia after the start of a special military operation in Ukraine. “People are not a resource that can be obtained in six months,” the authors of the study note.

So, reference points in this statistic. In January last year, against the background of the post-COVID economic recovery, 26% of enterprises signaled a shortage of personnel. In October of the same year, after the announcement of partial mobilization, already 33%. As the authors of the report note, during this period, the largest outflow of personnel occurred in light industry (70%), mechanical engineering (35%) and food production – 25%.

And in April 2023, the figure was already 35%. The loudest SOS signal comes from light industry enterprises.

It should be noted that according to official statistics, at the beginning of this year, a record low unemployment rate of 3.6% was registered in Russia. However, Igor Nikolaev, chief researcher at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says there is nothing to be proud of here, and warns of a looming staff shortage in the country in an era of unprecedented economic sanctions.

Moreover, as the authors of the study found out, the shortage of personnel “covered” not only the clothing or worsted production. There is a shortage of specialists in manufacturing, water supply, mining, transportation and storage. According to various sources, 61% of employers in the IT field complain about the lack of specialists: programmers, application developers, etc.

Why is light industry coming to the fore? And why in this industry will the revival, like a phoenix bird, of vocational schools (now such a system is called educational clusters) begin to meet the real needs of regional enterprises?

Recently, many global companies have left the Russian market, this niche could be filled by domestic production – respectively, with our spinners and tanners. However, there is simply no one to produce such products, there are no grassroots and middle-level specialists.

– Light industry in 1992 “fell down” before anyone else, – recalls Pavel Kudyukin, a trade unionist, in the 90s of the last century, Deputy Minister of Labor of Russia. – In the regions there was a decline in production, and this is putting it mildly. The system of secondary specialized education was severely “undermined”, vocational schools in the field began to re-profile. The products of our factories could not compete with import supplies.

– And rightly so! In the USSR, domestic suits or boots were nothing …

– But they were and kept on a planned economy. Then they did not particularly look at whether there was a demand for the product or not. They lowered the plan, funds for raw materials – and be kind enough to complete the production task. The light industry was one of the first to face competition from global manufacturers. Cheap goods from Turkey and China went to us. Although the most serious competitor in the clothing industry was Bangladesh. There, workers get just a penny, it was almost impossible for our manufacturers to compete with them. Brands, although global, but their production, as a rule, are located in Asian countries.

– The situation turns out to be a dead end. In Russia, the minimum level of unemployment, everything is in business. And there is a catastrophic shortage of personnel. Where can I get them?

– There will be a restructuring of the economy. We are already facing a decline in the solvency of the population. No matter what the statistics show, people’s real incomes are declining.