The Foundation for Development of Ukraine (FDU) will announce a contest to identify the most efficient mechanisms of interaction between higher educational establishments and employers under its Professional Ukraine Project. FDU Director Anatoliy Zabolotny said about it at a round table “Interaction Mechanisms between Education System and Employers to Train Professionals for Labour Market”. The session was organized by the Foundation in partnership with BEST, Bureau for Economical and Social Technologies, and supported by the World Bank.

The conference covered compliance of professional education with needs of the labour market, quality of educational programs, systems of graduate assessment including existing and possible variants for partnership between schools and businesses for professional training.

The discussion was attended by M.G. Lutskiy, Head of  Verkhovna Rada Professional Education Subcommittee; K.M. Lyapina, Head of Verkhovna Rada Regulatory Policy and Entrepreneurship  Subcommittee; N.I. Zinkevich, Assistant Director of the State Employment Service; T.M. Desyatov, Director of Professional Technical Education Department of the Ministry of Education and Science; Timo Kuusela, EU Education and Training Advisor; E.A. Bekh, World Bank’s representative and education expert; as well as representatives from big enterprises, organizations, and Ukrainian employers’ unions.

“Civilized countries show that partnership between the government and businesses develops in the strategic direction. This trend is reflected by emergence of mechanisms that represent interests of the government and businesses at micro- and macrolevel. The partners are getting more open to each other. The schemes for joint private and state financing of educational and research programs are being applied increasingly more. The role of business in developing curricula content and monitoring education quality is getting more important”, noted Irina Akimova, BEST Director. “But the traditional forms of partnership remain. They continue developing alongside with strategic forms, being a supplement to them and making the partnership more flexible and dynamic”.

“Compliance of educational system with rapidly growing labour market demands has been a burning problem these days. However, no solution is in place with many attempts to find one being just pretentious. The partnership between Ukrainian schools and employers won't replace the state education system. Our goal is to initiate a reform by exposing the actual situation in professional education”, said Anatoliy Zabolotny. “We can do it by developing high standards for assessing schools from perspectives of a school leaver and employer. We hope the contest will assist 2007 school leavers in making an informed and proper choice, and help schools realize the need to partner with employers”.

The higher education schools will be assessed by the following criteria:

interaction with employers, labour market demand for its graduates, career of graduates in the labour market, and satisfaction of employers with the school graduate quality.

Applications submission is expected to expire on 10 May, 2007. The results will be announced before 15 June, 2007.

30 March, 2007

Source: Kreshchatik, on-line edition
http://www.kreschatic.kiev.ua/news/news.php?newsid=2538