Mikhail Mishustin: “To achieve technological leadership effectively, we must significantly reduce the gap between engineering education and the needs of industries. This should be accomplished primarily through intensive practical training at enterprises.”
Mikhail Mishustin holds strategic session on development of educational institutions providing engineering training and scientific research for technological leadership
Mikhail Mishustin holds strategic session on development of educational institutions providing engineering training and scientific research for technological leadership
Mikhail Mishustin holds strategic session on development of educational institutions providing engineering training and scientific research for technological leadership
Mikhail Mishustin’s opening remarks:
Colleagues, good afternoon.
Today, we will discuss the development of engineering and technical education. Training specialists for these strategically important fields is a key component of implementing national technological leadership projects.
We have already laid the groundwork for a systemic approach to organising the work of specialised universities and colleges and identified the challenges they face.
The next step is to improve engineering training programmes and strengthen scientific and technological research.
We must more actively expand and deepen cooperation between secondary and higher technical education institutions and companies.
It is essential to clearly understand which specialists are needed, in which sectors, and in which regions, so that we can respond promptly to rapid changes in the labour market – an issue we have recently discussed. These shifts are happening quickly, and educational systems must be finetuned to reflect evolving workforce demands, which we must implement.
For example, in some regions of the Russian Federation, demand for skilled blue-collar workers exceeds the number of graduates severalfold. Such imbalances must be addressed as quickly as possible.
An important new tool in this effort is the workforce demand forecast, developed at the President’s instruction.
For the upcoming academic year, we have established detailed quotas for targeted admissions based directly on requests from employers for the first time. These quotas are distributed across universities, enrollment capacities, specialties, and fields of study, including scientific disciplines.
Colleagues, it is clear that to effectively achieve technological leadership, we must substantially narrow the gap between engineering education and industrial needs. This should be achieved primarily through extensive hands-on training at enterprises. This approach is particularly important given that many companies already consider this model of cooperation with universities and colleges a priority.
The same principle applies to teachers and mentors. They must have broad opportunities to upgrade their qualifications and gain up-to-date industrial expertise, and strengthen competencies related to technological leadership. For this, two specialised technology parks for vocational education are already operating in Kaluga and Nizhny Novgorod.
In keeping with the new approaches, it is also necessary to continue finetuning our flagship projects, such as Professionalism, Priority-2030, Advanced Engineering Schools, and the construction of a network of campuses.
And certainly we need to expand the project intended to enhance the quality of teaching of fundamental disciplines at universities, based on advanced engineering schools. It has been implemented since last year at our President’s instructions in order to help students master key natural science subjects.
Earlier, we focused on progress in creating the institution of chief designers. Today, it operates at 38 engineering universities and is manned by representatives of institutes of higher learning, industries, the academic community, and specialists directly related to the designing effort.
We will discuss how things stand in this regard, as we will the drafting of the methodology for leading research organisations and scientific and production associations, which we are planning to use to produce model technological process lines, manufactures, or materials. This will be a unified managerial chain comprising research-designing-experimental production-testing-certification-small-batch output.
Colleagues, the issues I have just outlined are not related to some specific industry alone but are of systemic importance for this country, its economy, and its industries. This is so because they are directly bound with the development of the personnel, scientific and technological potential, national competitiveness, and Russia’s technological leadership in key areas.
At today’s strategic session, we will have to devise a set of measures that need to be implemented in the near future in order to remove shortages of engineering personnel, redress structural imbalances within this category, and improve the quality of their training.
Let me stress that the expertise of the academic community, the experience and opinions of businesses, corporations, and all stakeholders are of fundamental importance in the context of this work.
