05. Babich N.S., Ivashchenkova N.V. Competencies in Higher Education and the Labor Market: A Sociocognitive Analysis of the Problem of Integration

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DOI: 10.15507/1991-9468.114.028.202401.068-080

Competencies in Higher Education and the Labor Market: A Sociocognitive Analysis of the Problem of Integration

Nikolay S. Babich
Cand.Sci. (Sociol.), Senior Researcher, Institute of Sociology – Branch of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (5 bld. 1 Bolshaya Andronievskaya St., Moscow 109544, Russian Federation), ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8697-3038, Scopus ID: 57201994829, Researcher ID: I-5630-2016, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Nataliya V. Ivashchenkova
Researcher, Center for Expert Market Research (15 Khokhlovsky Pereulok, Moscow 109028, Russian Federation), ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-7873-4847, Researcher ID: JZD-3052-2024, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract
Introduction. Professional competencies developed by the education system do not provide the high degree of integration with the real economy at the Russian labor market. The sociocognitive approach to social institutions as information processing systems suggests that this may be partly due to different languages used by employers and educational structures for describing competencies. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis of this mismatch drawing on the example of the applied sociology sector.
Materials and Methods. The case study method was applied to the material of the archive of correspondence on personnel issues of a company from the field of applied sociology, which worked in 2012–2019 (46 papers). The hypothesis that employers and educational system use a different language for describing competencies was tested. Content analysis method was applied to the largest Russian job portals: hh.ru, superjob.ru and Avito.Rabota. The hypothesis of non-use of educational standards for describing competencies in the labor market was tested.
Results. Both hypotheses were confirmed. Based on the results of the correspondence archive analysis, it was proved that employers use a language different from that of the education system when describing requirements to employees (including their competencies). The results of content analysis revealed the phenomenon of almost complete isolation of the labor market from the formal standards of higher education (educational standards for describing the competencies of sociologists were not used in a single vacancy or a resumé out of more than 32 thousand found on the portals).
Discussion and Conclusion. To overcome the lack of demand for graduates in the labor market, it is necessary to overcome the existing language gap between the education system and employers. To this end, the system of validation of competencies should be changed. The source of their description should not be the education system itself, the texts and ideas that are born in it, but the requirements of employers, verbalized by them in the description of vacancies. Descriptions of competencies that do not meet the widely accepted requirements of employers should be automatically excluded from professional education standards as invalid. The results contribute to searching critical problems in the educational system and adapting it to the current needs of the labor market.

Keywords: education system, labor market, competence approach, socio-cognitive model, content analysis

Acknowledgments: The authors express their gratitude to all study participants.

Conflict of interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

For citation: Babich N.S., Ivashchenkova N.V. Competencies in Higher Education and the Labor Market: A Sociocognitive Analysis of the Problem of Integration. Integration of Education. 2024;28(1):68–80. https://doi.org/10.15507/1991-9468.114.028.202401.068-080

All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

Submitted 24.08.2023; revised 10.01.2024;
accepted 17.01.2024.

Authors’ contribution:
N. S. Babich – literature review; text writing.
N. V. Ivashchenkova – data collection and processing.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.