This chapter is aimed at searching for a sophisticated equilibrium in vocational education in the digital economy times between its key stakeholders or, in other words, its gear wheels, which are the government, enterprise, university, and the people. The authors focus on the programs designed in the light of the digital economy. As emerging economies face bigger challenges, the chapter is about such countries, in particular about Russia as one of them which has a big state's stake. First, the chapter lays the groundwork to the instrumentalist vision of education for the stakeholders' relations and covers a historical background to the political economy in Russia. Secondly, the authors discuss the CVET key stakeholders' motives, capacities, and barriers. The authors demonstrate the spots where these wheels mismatch. Third, online learning is presented as a possible solution for at least some of the mismatches, such as the lack of the specialists and practice-based constituents in the learning program, the system bureaucracy, obsolete teaching approach, and rigid learning trajectories.
TopIntroduction: Digital Economy And Digital Skills
Current VUCA reality challenges each country to search for the solutions to this volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Many experts see a universal solution in people, and competitive human capital. Today universal meta-professional skills step forward, including immediate analytics, creative thinking, interpersonal communication, ability to learn during the lifetime, and others. Rapid development of information technologies made them “the new black” which are claimed to ensure multiple benefits to the countries’ economies. Economic activity resulted from the IT-enabled hyperconnectivity was named as “digital economy” (What is digital economy?). According to the International Digital Economy and Society Index (hereinafter I-DESI) report by the European commission, the digital economy indicators are 1) the connectivity which is the deployment of broadband infrastructure and its quality, 2) digital skills 3) citizen use of internet, 4) business technology integration and 5) digital public services (Foley et al., 2018). Digital skills went beyond the IT specialist’s skill set and became a must for all professions to different extent. As a result, the system should experience a high demand for a massive retraining of people with diverse backgrounds.
The key stakeholders of the digital economy and of continuing vocational education and retraining (hereinafter CVET) are the same, they are governments, citizens, businesses which provide services and educational institutions. The global digital economy race puts developing countries in the most difficult position as they need to move and multiply fast. Those stakeholders are so complex that their equilibrium is hardly achievable. They are like wheels in a four-wheel drive, where the best result is reached when all of them function.
This chapter is the result of the desk research about those stakeholders disequilibrium in Russia, which is a noteworthy case. The I-DESI score can be considered as one of the representations of these stakeholders’ success and troubles. For the readers’ convenience Russia’s score is compared to that of the EU average, though we realize that this solution is not perfect due to the diversity of European economies. The I-DESI report for 2013-2018 states that Russia’s overall score is close to the bottom four EU members, which are Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, and Romania (Foley et al., 2018). Its digital skills score combining basic and advanced skills, basic software (coding), telecommunications full-time employees and proportion of tertiary ICT graduates is lower than EU average (37 versus 42). Still, Russia’s share of ICT graduates exceeds the EU and non-EU average (0.631 versus 0.428 and 0.4) (Raw data, 2020). The firm-level technology absorption as one of the sub-indicators for the business technology integration is scored as low as 0.198, (EU average 0.418, non-EU average 0.477) (ibid). The World Economic Forum research on CVET shows that Russia is only 74th in terms of the extent of staff training and 76th on the quality of vocational training out of 141 economies (World Economic Forum, 2019).