progressive season

The university admissions campaign has begun, but as opinion polls show, the graduates of the school have not yet decided on an educational institution, faculty and career guidance. According to VTsIOM, 71% of high school students will enter universities in 2022, and few are still able to answer the age-old question of “what do I want to be when I grow up”. And the reason for this is not, as one might think, an irresponsible attitude towards one’s own bright future.

Graduates must choose a career path in the face of global uncertainty. Market demands change rapidly every 5-10 years. According to various estimates, by 2030 up to 65% of today’s schoolchildren and students will occupy positions that do not yet exist. At the same time, headhunting experts are struggling to predict which jobs will be destroyed by AI in the short term. And travel agents, accountants and even translators, which were very popular until recently, become a trace before our eyes with the development of technology.

If even in the early 2000s there was a generalized but understandable division in society into “humans” and “technicians”, today this boundary has been erased. In the 2000s, the same lawyers that parents encouraged to apply for the sake of big gains and expectations start working at Legal Tech, an area where classical law and technology intersect. In this case, who should apply for a child? High school students take four or five courses for the Unified State Examination to leave room for maneuver after admission.

Another problem is the dysfunctional career guidance system, which in many schools has been reduced to the same type of testing. In Japan, if, at the end of high school, children personally try sixty different professions: due to the tight integration of unions, enterprises and universities in the educational process, our students often do not try to connect their hobbies with a profession. profession or a profitable occupation. Young gamers and bloggers are afraid to develop their hobbies in eSports or media technologies. According to them, this is an unreliable business, and therefore they choose the usual “triple” of the EMU.

“Economics”, “Management” and “Law” are still the most popular faculties among paid applicants to universities.

Even with high scores, they are in no rush to retrain as engineers or reorient themselves in the natural sciences, despite the fact that there are enough government-funded places in these specialties. At the same time, the structure of the budgetary reception reflects not only the priorities of the country’s economic development, but also the demands for personnel from the business world and the market as a whole. Simply put, high school students often misjudge expectations and ignore their own interests.

However, following the pandemic and the mass shift to the tectonic plates, online education has slowly started to slide. Therefore, the most popular fields among applicants in the 2021 entry campaign were Health, IT and Computer Engineering, Pedagogical Education, Law and Economics.

However, the percentage of “refugees” is still high: only 27% of Russians work in their profession. And in many ways, this ideology leads to this percentage: not “where I want” but “I do it where there are enough points” or “where my parents say”.

To correct this imbalance, it is necessary not only to orientate schoolchildren on the needs and prospects for the development of the economy, but also to improve the quality of career guidance in general, without shifting this issue only to the shoulders of the state.

So, for example, it is advisable to establish a clear connection: a children’s circle – a specialized faculty at a university or technical school – a business. And then you can set a professional track that is understandable for kids. First they show their passion in a circle, then they come under the wing of the university, and then they do what they love at work. Today, only a few universities in the country use such applications.

Given the large number of beneficiaries of highly motivated employees, work should be carried out according to the principles of public-private partnership, which includes businesses, government departments, schools, universities and private career guidance companies starting to open in Russia.

After all, if you look at the picture globally, a person who has consciously entered the profession will do what he loves, less will be exhausted at work. That’s a plus for business and the economy: recruiting and training new staff costs two to three times more than retaining them.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.