Personnel for modernization of regional economy: the opinion of employers

The paper presents the results of a sociological research on the assessment of the availability of personnel in the industry of the Vologda Oblast. It shows the extent of personnel shortage, the degree of satisfaction of employers with the quality of personnel training. Considerable attention is paid to assessing individual characteristics of employees (qualification, performance and discipline) and their influence on the work of organizations in the course of modernization. The author points out that the shortage of personnel in the economy along with the reservation of the significant amount of the unemployed population may indicate the lack of coordination between the system of education and the labor market. This can also be manifest in the fact that the level of training of specialists, despite a continuous demand for them in the labor market, does not satisfy the employer. The authors reveal the problems in the human resources sphere that hamper the modernization of production. These problems are as follows: shortage of industrial-production personnel, middle managers, specialists and skilled workers; insufficient quality of training of graduates of various educational organizations. However, the authors state that even if the level of training of graduates is formally high, the enterprises that hire them, in most cases, lack innovation, and here we talk about the necessity of only partial modernization of production. The paper determines that the implementation of innovative change depends to a greater extent not on the level of education of personnel, but on its qualification and discipline. The authors compare the findings obtained at the regional level to the findings at the national level; for this purpose they use the data of the monitoring of education economics conducted by the National Research University Higher School of Economics. Similarities have been revealed primarily in employers’ assessments of the level of training of graduates of different educational institutions. The study raises an issue related to the information base. It shows that in order to carry out a more detailed analysis of the quality of education it is necessary to expand this database in terms of the aspects associated with the assessment of the level of competences and their impact on the work performance and innovative activity of the population.