Imbalance of professional personnel in the labor market

The article examines the essence of the imbalance of professional personnel, methods for assessing it and modern trends in the use of professional personnel in the regional labor markets of the Russian Federation. When studying existing approaches to the analysis of professional imbalances in the labor market, the authors identified two main directions with differences in subject matter and tools. In the framework of the first approach, which is characteristic mainly of the microeconomic level, professional and qualification imbalance is considered as situations of excess or deficiency, deficiency, obsolescence of professional skills and qualifications, as well as inconsistency of education with the professional duties performed. The second approach, characteristic of the macroeconomic level of analysis, studies the mismatch between the supply and demand of professional labor resources using unemployment indicators broken down by the level of education of the unemployed, their age characteristics, and last place of work. On this basis, the authors formed an idea of the essence of the imbalance of demand and supply of professional personnel as a discrepancy between the number of employees (demand) and the labor force (supply) with a certain level of professional education (higher, secondary, primary). The magnitude of the mismatch between supply and demand is the unemployment indicator used in this study to assess the static state and dynamic trends in the imbalance of professional personnel in the regional labor markets of the Russian Federation. The research hypothesis was that regional labor markets may differ significantly from each other in the level and dynamics of professional imbalance, which will require the development of regulatory measures in accordance with the prevailing characteristics. The conclusions obtained as a result of the study are that, in general, the labor market of the Russian Federation is characterized by a growing level of imbalance of professional personnel with a general reduction in unemployment. The paper also proposed theoretical combinations of changes in unemployment levels and imbalance of professional personnel, each of which characterizes a certain state of both the economy as a whole and the labor market.