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

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.