Farmland

Agroprom is ready to spend more on training specialists than metallurgists

The first competition among institutions of primary and secondary vocational education, which ended yesterday, showed that employers and officials consider vocational schools for metallurgists to be the most important for the economy, and sponsors give preference to schools that train mid-level specialists for agriculture. “Of the 76 winning institutions of primary and secondary vocational education, more than a third belong to the branches of mechanical engineering, metallurgy, metalworking, aircraft manufacturing and shipbuilding,” said Evgeniy Butko, deputy head of the Federal Agency for Education, at a press conference. “In second place – 18% – are construction, transport and services.” The third position with 14% is shared by schools “for electronics engineers” (automation, instrument engineering, computer science, electronics) and institutions for training specialists in the agricultural industry. Pedagogical and medical schools are represented in the literal sense of the word by units.

The laureates of the professional competition will receive 20-30 million rubles from the federal budget. for the implementation of their development programs. The total funding for the program is 1.8 billion rubles. Entrepreneurs will add about 2 billion more to the vocational education reform fund. “One of the conditions for participation in the competition for the new direction of the national project “Education” was 100% co-financing of development programs,” explained Andrei Svinarenko, chairman of the competition commission, former first deputy minister of education, and now executive vice president of the RSPP.

It is noteworthy that the interests of the state and entrepreneurs apparently turned out to be slightly different. The volume of co-financing of agro-industrial education from business significantly exceeds the costs that representatives of other sectors of the economy are willing to bear for the training of young personnel. Private investments in agricultural educational institutions exceed investments of metallurgists and aircraft manufacturers by 1.5 times. As one of the members of the competition commission, Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Education Nikolai Bulaev explained to Vremya Novostey, it is in agriculture that today there is the most serious shortage of personnel. “Apparently, business representatives interested in workers wanted to solve this problem as quickly as possible,” he said. “We considered one application where investments in the development of an educational institution by private capital exceeded the expected government subsidies by approximately four times.”

The record active participation of industrialists and entrepreneurs in general in this competition was especially noted by the Minister of Education and Science Andrei Fursenko. According to him, “business is represented on such a large scale in education for the first time,” “there is a growing understanding that the most important limitation of our economy is not money, but personnel at the blue-collar level.”

Kirill VASILENKO