“One of the ways to solve youth unemployment can be seen through the development of a dual education system in technical professions in Kazakhstan,” – Aiman Zhusupova, a sociologist and graduate of the CABAR.asia School of Analytics 2021, writes about the problems of dual education and how to promote it in an article written specifically for CABAR.asia.
The urgency of the problem of youth unemployment will increase for Kazakhstan, due to the projected growth in the number of employable youth over the next ten years. Obviously, this problem was one of the key ones in the context of the tragic events that took place in Almaty in January 2022.
It cannot be said that youth unemployment does not concern the authorities of the country. One of the ways to solve it is seen in the development of a dual education system in Kazakhstan in technical professions, which significantly increases the chances of employment of young professionals. At the same time, free training in technical specialties within the framework of CTE (career and technical education) has been carried out in Kazakhstan since 2017.
This approach is justified, since today the country has a high demand for qualified professional and technical personnel, in particular, there is an acute shortage of professional engineers, technical specialists and middle-ranking managers in production.
However, after 10 years since the launch of a dual education system in Kazakhstan, its scaling and significant development has not taken place.
Dual training: beneficial for all parties
Dual training assumes that a student, while simultaneously obtaining theoretical knowledge at a university or college, has the opportunity to learn practical knowledge in real production, with expensive equipment and an appropriate material and technical base, without which, in fact, the meaning of their education is lost. At the same time, technical work is currently becoming more and more complicated and automated.
This approach is gaining ground in developed countries as it brings benefits to all parties. So, students after completing their studies within the framework of this dual education system will not only have a clear understanding of how to apply the acquired knowledge, but also a very real opportunity for employment in the enterprise where they were trained within the framework of dual education. Moreover, the production manager gets the opportunity to hire a new employee who has received qualifications and work experience in their enterprise.
In turn, educational institutions not only reduce the cost of purchasing and updating the equipment necessary for training in technical specialties, but also produce qualified and sought-after specialists, which increases the competitiveness of both universities and colleges.
At the state level, the effective implementation of a dual education system also helps to increase the investment attractiveness of regions.
According to experts, today in Kazakhstan the employment of college graduates is one of the main criteria for placing state orders in colleges. To receive grants, colleges need at least 50% of their graduates to be employed. Also, the employment of graduates is considered the main indicator of the success of the concept and development of education in the Republic of Kazakhstan until 2025.
Separately, it is worth noting that dual training solves the problem of fragmentation of theoretical and practical knowledge provided by educational institutions already at the level of developing educational programs, which are formed with the active participation of employers. As a result, students in classrooms study first and foremost what is really useful to them in their future professional activities.
Dual education system in the Republic of Kazakhstan: what has been done to date?
In Kazakhstan, the system of dual education was introduced back in 2012, and in 2014 a roadmap was developed for “Introducing Dual Education System”, which covered 83 specialties within 11 priority sectors. As of March 2022, dual education is being implemented in 536 colleges of the country already in 166 specialties and 445 qualifications in 15 areas: Metallurgy, Construction, Agriculture, Production and installation, Service, Economics, Transport, etc.
Since the launch of the dual education system, 206 thousand students have received it. At the same time, there is an annual increase in both the number of students studying within the framework of the dual education system, from 10 thousand in 2013 to 58 thousand in 2020, and educational institutions, as well as enterprises, within the framework of which dual education is provided. The number of on-the-job training contracts increased from 522 in 2014 to 35,482 in 2020.
Measures taken to develop dual education in Kazakhstan also include:
- Introducing the concept of dual education into the labor code, creating a legal framework for dual education. Today, the dual education system includes at least 60% of training practice in production and 40% of theoretical training in educational organizations.
- With dual training, educational organizations can change up to 80% of the content of educational programs together with employers.They also have academic freedom in terms of training periods.
- Students count the time of internship in their seniority, which on average ranges from 6 months to 1.5 years. It is assumed that this innovation will increase the chances of students for employment.
- A number of measures are being implemented to encourage employers to participate in dual education. Among them, compensation to employers for the costs of teaching students, in turn, mentors at enterprises also receive payment for their activities.
- By 2025, 100% coverage of students with dual training in technical and technological specialties is planned, and 50% of students – as part of the state order at the workplace.
To date, work is underway to introduce targeted training of personnel commissioned by enterprises. There are also plans to increase the number of mentors in enterprises, to train them in pedagogical skills.
Despite such significant plans and steps aimed at the development of dual education after ten years of launching this direction, the coverage of students with dual education in Kazakhstan remains low. In this vein, before the pandemic, the coverage of dual education was at about 19%. The representatives of the Ministry of Education and Science stated themselves that the scaling of dual education in Kazakhstan did not happen.
Problems and solutions regarding dual education in Kazakhstan
In his address to the entrepreneurs of Kazakhstan after the January events in 2022, K. Tokayev suggested that businessmen, within the framework of social responsibility, take “under the patronage” the country’s colleges, apparently implying not only the modernization of their material and technical base, but also the process of training and further employment of graduates, which implies the development of dual education, the establishment of interaction with colleges in this direction.
What is the reason for the low growth in the development of the dual education system in Kazakhstan?
- The low level of interest of enterprises in taking students for training due to their unwillingness to spend their own funds on this. As a positive example in this context, Germany is most often mentioned, where the financial investment of employers in the CTE system is at least two thirds of the total budget. At the same time, we are talking not only about the lack of investment, but about the social immaturity of employers in general, which manifests itself, among other things, in the unwillingness to interact with the education system, and the inability to formulate an educational order.
It should be noted that one of the solutions proposed by the researchers is the legislative consolidation of tax preferences for business structures for participation in personnel training.
- There is also a banal shortage of places at enterprises for industrial training, in addition, a small staff of enterprises does not allow employment of all graduates at the place of internship.
- Separately, it is worth highlighting the problems associated with the legal regulation of dual education. Thus, the existing rules in this regard are more aimed at regulating the activities of colleges, but not enterprises. Whereas in countries with developed systems of dual education, all activities in this direction are clearly regulated by laws.
- The problem is the lack of an assessment framework for the introduction of dual education in relation to colleges. Therefore, it is understandable that there are problems with assessing the acquired professional skills of specialists for compliance with the requirements of the industry. So far, experts are forced to state that outdated educational standards are in force in the country.
At the same time, the importance of assessing the implementation of dual training is also updated because the country plans to reimburse the costs of enterprises for training personnel within the framework of dual training, which will be done by increasing the cost of grants in the framework of per capita financing of CTE.
That is, in order to exclude opportunities for a corruption component, a clear control over the implementation of training is necessary, which is most fair to do on the basis of an independent assessment of the acquired professional skills.
- A separate problem is also the lack of linkage to the needs of the labor market, both in terms of volume and specialties, including the lack of consideration of the needs of certain regions in the training of personnel by educational institutions in the region.
One of the recommendations of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation as part of the work on the transformation of the economy of Kazakhstan, published in 2019, is the need for import substitution in the selection of specialties for dual training in order to train in-demand personnel based on indicators of attracting foreign labor.
Thus, all these factors together affect the fact that despite the desire and efforts of the country to train its own technical specialists, there is still a shortage of highly qualified workers in the country, and the quality of education of domestic graduates in technical specialties often does not suit employers. This problem, in turn, raises the question of the effectiveness of the implementation of programs for the development of free technical education in the country, including dual education.
At the same time, dual education is the main solution for reducing youth unemployment in the world today.
Internship in educational institutions
As shown by numerous studies and, in general, wide-ranging observations, the countries of the post-Soviet space are generally characterized by the perception of internship within the educational process as a formality. What can be done with this fact and who is responsible for the effectiveness of the internship?
The results of one of the studies showed that students who had an internship indicated that employees of the enterprise were not interested in them (46.9%); the fact that at enterprises they were used as free labor in solving problems that were not related to their professional specialization (33.5%); noted a lack of special knowledge (20.1%), while those that they received at the university were not related to work in production (26.8%).
Thus, students blame employers for the current situation, on the basis of whose enterprises they have internships and educational institutions, since their knowledge does not allow them to fully integrate and merge into the work process. In turn, universities accuse students of a lack of consciousness, a low level of focus on the future goals of their career development and point to growing competition everywhere.
It turns out that the responsibility for the practical training of young specialists is borne not only by university employees, but also by employers who, complaining about the insufficient level of training of domestic specialists, do not in fact take the creation of suitable conditions for industrial practice at their enterprises seriously.
At the same time, the need for a conscious attitude to internship on the part of the students themselves cannot be discounted. How could it be done? First of all, explaining the benefits of doing an internship, including the opportunity to assess the level of one’s own knowledge and skills in the field of a future profession in a real production process. Also, it is in the conditions of internship that students have a real opportunity to gain reputation in a possible place of future work.
Accordingly, the attitude to internship as a formal process should change in all directions: on the part of universities, employers, and students themselves.
Moreover, if on the part of enterprises, we are talking about the need to give instructions to students from a number of real production tasks, then educational institutions should be maximally focused on the needs of employers in the context of the knowledge provided to students. In turn, students should be focused on quality and conscious internship, based on the need to adapt to the requirements of the future profession, understanding that practice is the first step in their future employment.
In this vein, as part of the internship, students, as well as employers and educational institutions, get a clear vision of what competencies and skills still need to be acquired, and, accordingly, provided so that the graduate becomes a sought-after specialist.
Conclusion and recommendations
Today, the government is implementing a number of projects with a narrow focus – solving the problems of youth unemployment – “Youth Internship”, “First Job”, “Contract of Generations“. At the same time, according to the conditions, the project is also beneficial for employers – wages are subsidized by the state. All these projects are aimed at creating temporary jobs, and, of course, the big question is whether or not employers will want to keep young specialists at work after the end of state subsidies. Unfortunately, one cannot discount the possibility of corruption, which is due to the possibility of receiving subsidies for the wages of temporary youth workers.
There are also separate special programs that are aimed at helping young professionals find internships, after which their chances of finding a job are significantly increased.
At the same time, the effectiveness of these projects, as well as many others in the field of reducing youth unemployment, primarily depends on how seriously and consciously the main stakeholders, including the unemployed youth themselves and employers, take its implementation. In fact, this is the main recommendation and task, since it is the formal approach that makes all the steps taken in this direction meaningless, including internships as part of the educational process.
As for dual education, in order to increase its coverage, first of all, it is necessary to proceed from the requests of employers in the development and formation of an educational order. Since there is often in Kazakhstan a banal lack of places at enterprises, an overabundance of specialists of various specialties.
An equally important issue is the effectiveness of dual education system, and in general technical education in the country. Here it is worth talking about the development of rules aimed at regulating the activities of enterprises that are involved in the implementation of dual education system. This is even more appropriate in the context of state support for subsidizing jobs for interns, training mentors. It is important that the tasks that are set for young specialists are narrow profile in nature and contribute to their professional development.
In a broader context, as experts have repeatedly stated, the task associated with increasing the effectiveness of dual education system is to introduce its evaluation framework, develop new standards that will give an understanding of how much the training received, including at the enterprise, meets the requirements of the modern labor market, the requirements of the industry.
It also makes sense to create a single, common database (platform) of data for students, with a list of organizations and places where they could complete their internship and generally improve their skills. Separately, it should be noted that the effectiveness of this measure will directly depend on the level of dissemination of information about this platform among young people.
In this vein, today the problem of awareness of the measures taken by the state in solving the problems of youth unemployment is one of the most important. Thus, according to experts, only 10% of Kazakhstani youth took part in state programs, which is primarily due to the low level of awareness about them. Therefore, it makes sense to inform young people about these kinds of resources, platforms through social networks that are most in demand among the youth.