April 2016: participants of regional "Young Professionals" championship in Krasnodar working to WorldSkills standards. (c) Vitaly Timkiv / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.Each year for the last four years, students at Russia’s technical and vocational colleges —builders, mill operators, carpenters, cabinet makers, not to mention florists, beauticians, cooks and apprentices in other trades and occupations – have gathered in various cities in Russia. They are contestants in the WorldSkills Russia national competition, which was established to raise the status of vocational secondary education. The winners travel to the international WorldSkills final, where they will compete with students from other countries.
“Promoting blue collar sector occupations isn’t a bad idea,” says Sergey Yenikolopov, head of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Sociology of Education laboratory. “But it’s unlikely to revive their reputation — the status of vocational education in Russia has fallen irreversibly in the past 20 years. There’s an enormous gap between status and reality — status, after all, is about how highly this education is valued by society. But if a system loses this status, even pouring cash into the sector won’t put things right. We need to look at it another way, and show that a given trade or occupation is essential to our economy. Who’s going to respond nowadays to a call to become a mill operator, a machinist or a nurse? Nobody! Most of these occupations are just not attractive to school leavers.”
According to a report by Russia’s Higher School of Economics, young people’s interest in vocational education is dropping significantly. In the year 2000, 115 out of every 10,000 students were studying for clerical qualifications, but by 2013 this figure had fallen to 50. The number of students studying for other middle-level qualifications is also dropping, from 161 per 10,000 in 2000 to 144 in 2015. These students attend a variety of vocational and technical secondary schools and colleges, and the system has undergone considerable change in the last decade, but not always for the better.
