The Professional structure of modern Russia: features and dynamics

Abstract

In the 2000–2010s, the dynamics of the professional structure of Russia was characterized by the persisting trends of decrease in the number of skilled workers in the industrial sector and increase in the number of trade and service workers. However, in the 2000s a new trend has also developed: an increase in the share of specialists among the employed. In the 2010s this trend became even more prominent, reflecting the transition of Russian society to a new stage of economic and technological development. The population responded to this trend with a rapid increase in the share of people with higher education, which was far ahead of the increase in the number of jobs for highly qualified specialists. As a result, both employment at jobs that do not require higher education and unemployment have risen sharply among Russians with higher education. However, since people with higher education have the opportunity to choose the most attractive jobs in any professional classes, the aspiration of Russians to receive higher education has remained in place. All these trends have aggravated the problem of the “qualification pit” (skills mismatch), in which there are currently more than half of the working population in Russia. An important aspect of it is also the mass occurrence of mismatch between employment and specialization received during education, which has become the new norm for all professional classes. Due to unjustified inequalities in wages, universal deprofessionalization is taking place against the background of an increase in formal indicators of the education level. Among the imbalances in the development of the professional structure is also the growing socio-demographic asymmetry. The age gap between representatives of various professional classes and subgroups is growing, youth unemployment is still high even against the background of a labor shortage. The gender asymmetry of employment is also increasing; it is seen in the increasing feminization of all groups of “white-collar” employment against the growing share of men among skilled manual workers. This lead, among other things, to an increasingly privileged position of male specialists and an increase in the disbalance in the character of employment of men and women, which determines changes in their demographic behavior