By Sayasat Nurbek and Yerbol Moldakassimov
Introduction (problematics)
The labor market in Kazakhstan, like anywhere in the world, suffers from the evergreen issue of mismatch between the supply, quality of skills and de-facto demands of the workplace. Apart from objective, systemic reasons, like the quality of education and its alignment to the expectations of employers, one subjective factor is particularly critical. It is about the ill-informed or wrongly motivated choice of future profession by high-school students and their parents that ultimately bring them into the tricky situation to get trained for over-supplied and low-demanded professions in the local labor market and puts them at a higher threat of unemployment or underemployment. This happens because parents often believe in the illusory prestige of certain occupations, like lawyers, economists, the “niche” that is already heavily overpopulated in the local labor market.
To depict this situation with the daily life story, imagine a family dinner with dad, mom, and their son in the high school, who want to decide together on the future profession of their offspring.
Dad: Son, we need to talk to you seriously.
Son: Yes, daddy.
Dad: The university entrance exams are just around the corner. We had a discussion with your Mom, and we are sure that you have to study for a lawyer, like your father.
Son: Lawyer? Daddy, but I was thinking of becoming a computer game designer.
Dad: Computer game… what? I appreciate your sense of humor, dear, but don’t you understand yourself, that it will not get you far?
Mom: On top of that, your eyesight can become worse, and staring into a laptop screen for hours will definitely not make it better.
Dad: I have many friends in the court, and lawyers are required in every single organization. So, your job will be guaranteed.
Mom: Where are you going? You have not finished your meal… Come back!
This story shows how the future profession is usually chosen by lots of young people and, mostly, under the influence of their parents and relatives.
According to the news portal in Kazakhstan, 60% of university graduates do not work according to the profession or specialty-trained for at the university [1]. Therefore, the problem exists, at least, at two levels.
Firstly, at the individual level, a person does what he was not professionally trained for, meaning that in fact, their work performance is not professional.
Secondly, at the state level, people do not work according to the specialization in which they were trained in the university or a college. This means a mere waste of public or parental funds used to support their studies, leaving alone the labor productivity and other macroeconomic indicators.
On top of that, against the backdrop of a rapid pace of technological development under the industry 4.0 umbrella, the life cycle of professions becomes much shorter, whereas the speed of change in skill “appetites” of the labor market grows exponentially.
Thus, the traditional problem moves into a brand new economic reality, requiring a corresponding response and approach. In other words, a new, simple, user-friendly, and massive vocational guidance tool.
Political context
In 2019 in the cooperation with the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of Kazakhstan and “Eurasian Resources Group” (ERG) company – one of the key players in the country’s mining industry presented a vision for the development of the project, namely “the Atlas of New Professions of Kazakhstan”. One of the key official partners in developing the Kazakhstani Atlas of New Professions is the Russian Atlas of Emerging Jobs that has contributed significantly to building the local methodological expertise and capacity in Kazakhstan.
The Atlas of Emerging Jobs is an almanac of promising industries and occupations for the next 10–15 years, initially developed in Russia in 2014. It will help to understand which industries, will actively develop; what new technologies, products, management practices will be born in and what new skills and competencies will be in demand by employers. On the other hand, the Atlas will shed light on what industries, professions, skills will become unnecessary, and which parts of the country’s labor will need retraining, upskilling and mobilization to other jobs.
Thus, the Atlas of Emerging Jobs currently designates to become one of the most advanced vocational guidance tools that help to understand future trends in the labor market and identify specialties and skills that will become relevant or appear in the coming decade.
The Atlas relies on the Skills Technology Foresight (STF) methodology developed by Skolkovo business school in Moscow and verified by the International Labor Organization (ILO) [2].
In June 2010, at the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Toronto, the International Labor Organization presented the Professional Training Strategy “Qualified Labor Force — The Basis of Intensive, Sustainable and Balanced Economic Growth” [3]. The strategy was based on the “Recommendations on the skills needed to increase productivity, employment growth and economic development”, adopted at the International Labor Conference in June 2008. Since then, the methodology has been successfully adopted and piloted by several countries in various initiatives within their labor market policies.
In 2014, two pilot projects for testing STF were implemented in Armenia and Vietnam by SKOLKOVO business school under ILO supervision in separate sectors of the economy (food industry, information and communication technologies, precision engineering and metalworking industry). In 2015, STF was the core of a project to develop a national strategy for developing skills in Tanzania. In 2016, STF was used in a project on forecasting staffing needs in Tunisia and in South Africa.
In Kazakhstan, ERG is, in fact, the pioneering organization that has officially introduced and employed this international methodology to better understand and meet its staffing needs.
In the meantime, Atlas of New Professions does not solely confine to the mining industry of Kazakhstan. Since ERG is a quasi-public company with 40% of its shares belonging to the government of Kazakhstan, active political discussions have brought the project to the nationwide level.
As a result, the Atlas of New Professions has become part of President Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev’s Decree, dated June 19, 2019 [4], and is now being implemented as the national project covering 9 sectors – the main drivers of Kazakhstan’s economy:
– Mining and metallurgy;
– Oil & Gas;
– Energy;
– Agriculture;
– Construction;
– Machine building;
– IT;
– Transport & Logistics;
– Tourism.
In the national project, ERG is represented by its subsidiary company “BTS Education” LLP [5] that provides methodological support on a pro bono basis in building the national Atlas of New Professions of Kazakhstan.
In terms of the timeline, the first official release of the Atlas of New Professions is planned for March 2020 with the mining & metallurgy and the oil & gas sectors to be presented first, along with the official page of the Atlas of New Professions at the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection official web-site called enbek.kz and a free mobile app for citizens.
Structure of the Atlas
The Atlas of New Professions has a comprehensive, yet simple logical structure. It may be built at any level, be it an enterprise, sub-industry, industry, region or the whole country.
The Atlas, based on the analysis of on-going trends, challenges and opportunities, technologies, frameworks and policies, ultimately leads to 3 categories of professions:
– new professions, that have never existed before and will emerge as the outcome of rapid technological development.
– changing professions, that appear as the result of modifications in the existing professions.
– disappearing professions are the ones that will no longer be necessary, and these specialists will require a retraining or upskilling for other jobs to be saved from unemployment.
As a schematic example, below is the profession map from the Atlas of New Professions prepared at the enterprise-level for Donskoy Ore Mining and Processing Plant as part of the groundbreaking pilot project of ERG in May 2019.
The professions map came out as the result of a two-day rapid-foresight session prepared and facilitated by the group of STF-certified experts under the supervision of Sayasat Nurbek – Head of the “Atlas of New Professions of Kazakhstan” national project.
During this session, 30 experts of Donskoy Ore Mining and Processing Plant, divided into “production” and “services” subgroups, engaged in a deep-dive brainstorming session to think about the future image and professions of their enterprise.
Apart from its intended results, the session brought some interesting insights. So, for instance, among global trends, having a scalable effect on the enterprise, and the mining industry, in general, was named the development of remote control systems and unmanned aerial vehicles, allowing the removal of people from dangerous and hazardous workplaces.
As indicated in the Professions Map, one of the new professions is the unmanned aerial vehicle operator, who controls the drone operating inside the mine. And the best person to be trained for this job, according to the experts, is, you will never guess… a computer gamer with well-developed visual coordination, reaction, like, for instance, a Counter-Strike player.
A similar map will be produced as part of the Atlas of New Professions for the 9 industries mentioned above.
However, this map by itself might not be of sufficient informational value for a simple citizen and the state. The map gives rise to an entire bunch of logical, frequently asked questions.
For high-school students and their parents:
- Where can I get trained for these professions?
- What is the amount of tuition fees? Can our family afford that?
- What is the closest university (college) to our house to master the profession?
For the state:
- What new educational programs should be introduced to train those specialists?
- What to do with the specialists whose professions will become no longer relevant and necessary? For which professions can they be retrained?
So, to address systematically these, other issues and deliver full value to the general public and the state, there is the second part of the Atlas called the Localization Program of New Professions.
The Localization Program will contain the list of universities and colleges presently offering full-time degree programs in the specialties closest to the new professions in the Professions Ma;, recommendations on which of these degree programs can serve as the basis to reconfigure for new educational programs and the universities (colleges) in which these courses will be offered.
As a result, the Atlas of New Professions will help millions of Kazakhstanis and their children make an informed career choice – a stable path towards success and prosperity.
Avenues for further action and internationalization
Nowadays, the Atlas of New Professions and Localization Map from a geographical point of view are oriented towards universities and colleges in Kazakhstan.
At the same time, there is undoubtedly a vast potential to extend the geographical scope of the project by cooperating with interested foreign counterparts in, at least, the following dimensions:
- Use and refine the Kazakhstani expertise to develop the Atlas of New Professions for other countries with a similar structure of the economy and labor market context;
- In terms of developing the new educational programs in the universities or colleges for new or changing professions, Kazakhstan can become the educational hub for citizens of other countries, who are in need to train for the same professions and skills, but do not have available educational programs in universities and colleges of their own countries;
- Building an international community of certified foresight experts and a bank of best practices and solutions geared towards enhancing the responsiveness and resilience of labor markets in the modern age.
Sayasat Nurbek is a national-level expert on education, education management, education program design, education, and labor market analysis and policies. Currently, he is the CEO of BTS Education LLP, National Coordinator of the project “Atlas of the new professions”. He also represents National Geographic Kazakhstan as a goodwill ambassador. He can be contacted at sayasat.nurbek@bts-education.kz and sayasat@gmail.com
Yerbol Moldakassimov is the Head of Research at BTS Education LLP, a certified Skills Technology Foresight expert. He can be contacted at yermold84@gmail.com
References
[1] https://informburo.kz/stati/60-vypusknikov-vuzov-ne-rabotayut-po-professii-pochemu-tak-proishodit.html.
Accessed December 23 2019
[2] https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—ed_emp/—ifp_skills/documents/publication/wcms_534225.pdf.
Accessed December 23 2019
[3] https://www.ilo.org/moscow/information-resources/publications/WCMS_345398/lang–en/index.htm.
Accessed December 23 2019
Accessed December 23 2019
Accessed December 24 2019
Accessed December 24 2019
[7] https://alchetron.com/NEO-(Counter-Strike-player)
Accessed December 24 2019
