Educational and qualificational disproportions of Ukraine's regional labor market

Abstract

The article deals with educational and qualificational features and disproportions of the regional labor market. The authors reveal and summarize the features of structural and dynamic characteristics of the labor market in an industrial region (Zaporizhzhya region), and professional and sectoral structure of the employed and unemployed population. The disproportionality between regional distribution of vocational education and demand for skilled labor is considered in the context of the uneven distribution of employees by professions and economic activities, which led to distortions in the quantitative and qualitative structure of the labor market and further aggravated the mismatch between the level of labor's skills and the needs of employers at the regional level. The paper substantiates the conclusion about the autonomy of the trajectories of vocational education development in the region and the labor market of worker professions, which shows up in the excessive qualification of the employed population in the region. Based on the results of analytical calculations, the authors identified and fully characterized the professional "core" of the Zaporizhzhya region, which covers no less than 80% of all employed in the worker professions and identified, in its structure, the most wide spread professions in the region. The comparative characteristic of the professional "core" with the need of employers and their salary offers allowed to identify the bottlenecks of the occupational structure of employment in the region. Since the training of workers in accordance with the policy of decentralization is a prerogative of local authorities, it is at the regional level that workers should be trained to ensure the replenishment of a professional "core". The authors prove that the system of worker training in Zaporizhzhya region is not able to bring the training of skilled workers in line with the needs of the labor market. It is the social dialogue with all stakeholders in the region that acquires particular importance for the modernization of the content of educational policy.