Why is RANEPA looking for caring IT specialists?

The Presidential Academy told how the development of the Digital Block will help “Promote Employment”

The Presidential Academy has seriously taken up the development of the Digital Block. The management plans are ambitious – to make RANEPA one of the leaders in the digitalization of the educational industry. Vice-Rector, Head of the Digital Block of the Presidential Academy Pavel Klepinin spoke about how and why digital optimization is carried out.

According to Klepinin, now the main efforts are aimed at finding a strong and competent team. Some of the necessary functions were completely absent in the previous IT block: architecture, project office, data management, institute of IT business partners, life cycle management of IT assets, development of digital culture.

“Our priority is human-centricity. The implementation of this approach is, first of all, about changing the culture of interaction of the Digital Block with employees of other divisions of the Academy, with users of our information systems and digital services. Of course, the ideal is to ensure that there are no failures, but this does not happen even in the most digitally mature companies. Many questions arise due to the lack of basic information about the work carried out by IT specialists,” says Klepinin.

He adds that positive changes should primarily affect support, and several improvements need to be made. Thus, all requests must be registered, routed to specialized specialists, have a planned review period and a mandatory satisfaction rating provided by the user. Especially those, for example, who chose a distance learning format to acquire a new profession under one of the Employment Promotion programs.

Another important topic is to conduct thorough testing of information system updates before they are put into operation. Therefore, the new structure introduces the positions of both testers and technical writers.

Stabilizing the work of the CAS (Integrated Automated System) is the highest priority task, because for acceptance in 2024 we are going with CAS. In December, we are finishing preparing a list of improvements that need to begin to be implemented now, so that at the height of the Admissions campaign the service functions normally,” the speaker emphasized.

He added that before introducing something new, it is necessary to specify the requirements for functionality, prepare a work plan, and make an assessment of financial costs, not only for implementation, but also for further operation of the solution.

Changes in the Digital Block will also affect the quality of training under the Federal program “Employment Promotion”, in which RANEPA takes part. This socially important project helps Russians with a difficult situation in the labor market obtain the necessary skills to get a job. More than 1,000 free educational programs are available, individually tailored to regional labor market needs. Disciplines include public administration, accounting, law, programming and many others. It is important to create the most comfortable conditions for users to learn and work with online courses.

One of the main principles for solving the problem of optimizing the Digital Block, according to the vice-rector, is that no new solutions will be implemented in the absence of the internal customer, the manager whose employees then become users of the information system. Key users from these departments will necessarily be involved in the implementation project team.

“I am driven by the idea of ​​making the Academy a leader in digital maturity in the industry, so that other universities look up to us, so that they come to us for experience and best practices. I am motivated by achieving big, ambitious goals. …The Academy has every opportunity to do this in reality,” concluded Klepinin.