Since 2020, the Rivne region in North-West Ukraine has been the site of an exciting new experiment. Building off the EU's Smart Specialisation policy, local stakeholders are working in partnership with experts from the European Training Foundation (ETF) to identify the new skills and new approaches to human capital development required to transform Rivne's woodworking industry into a true global player. Inaugurated at a two-day virtual meeting on 10 and 11 February 2021, this joint effort will help define the region's economic future - and it is being done from the bottom up!
Smart Specialisation is a collaborative approach to policy-making, which aims to boost jobs and growth by enabling individual regions to determine their own strengths, and develop their own competitive advantages. The ETF contributes by injecting vocational education and training (VET), and skills development into the mix. By working in partnership with local actors to determine a region's current and future skills needs, it aims to create the conditions that will sustain a true ecosystem of innovation.
Launched in 2019 by the Committee for Regional Development, Rivne, the Smart Specialisation process identified Woodworking and Furniture Manufacturing as the key sub-sector for the region's economic development. The February meeting marked the beginning of the ETF's Foresight action, which will help policymakers, VET schools and businesses to anticipate change, prepare their responses and adopt strategies to address evolving skills needs in the area. Attended by a broad mix of employers, policy-makers and VET professionals, it wasted no time getting down to the key issues.
Woodworking and furniture manufacturing are already major sources of employment in Rivne, accounting for 5.9% of jobs. Employment in the sector increased by 24% over the last five years, and is currently growing by 4.5% annually.
Despite those seemingly optimistic numbers, the region needs to overcome some serious obstacles if it is to effectively integrate the global market.
Some of them are environmental: climate change is exerting a negative impact on the forests that supply the industry’s raw material, making it urgent to develop more sustainable practices.
Others are more human: one local business-owner described how he has jobs in his order book and the state-of-the-art machinery to do them, but yet cannot find any qualified workers to operate it.
Kicking off the opening session, Petro Korgevskyi - Head of the Department of Education and Science at the Rivne Regional State Administration - outlined the challenge. "We want Rivne to be very attractive for investors," he told the meeting, "but our VET schools aren't equipped with innovative machinery. We need people who know how to work with up-to-date equipment, and their skills need to be up-to-date too."
On the second day, Oksana Donska from the Ukrainian Association of Furniture Manufacturers drove the point home. She described how her members are facing acute staff shortages, with an average of one qualified applicant for every eight job vacancies. Like several other participants, Donska emphasized how businesses and VET institutions need to work together, to establish what skills the labour market needs and ensure that they are reflected in the schools' curricula. But the challenge is a financial one too. The equipment that today's workers need to know how to operate can cost up to €100,000: somehow, the money must be found to supply it to the VET schools and centres.
There is already broad agreement on the kind of skills that are lacking in the sector today. The ETF's National Experts Rodion Kolyshko and Mykola Sudakov defined them as mainly digital skills, computer programming and modelling, computer-assisted technical drawing, and mastery of modern equipment and production techniques. Yet one of the meeting's most interesting discussions focused on where trainees should be learning them.
Orest Kiyko, of the Ukrainian National Forestry University, said that it would be a mistake to think that changing the curriculum in VET schools would improve the future prospects of the sector; in his opinion, the creative thinking that guarantees success in today's global market would be best fostered by higher education. Other participants - including Nino Damenia, an independent expert - held the view that for strengthening the region’s competitiveness, the activity of VET schools needs to be repositioned, away from its traditional manual focus and towards something at the crossroads of professional training and higher education.
A glimpse of what higher vocational training at the post-secondary level might look like was provided by Hélène Overmeer and Tjalling Mulder, of the Hout- en Meubilerings College (HMC) in the Netherlands. HMC encourages a "golden triangle" of cooperation between teachers, students and companies - with a strong focus on innovation and international projects - and attracts growing numbers of students who have completed their secondary education. That model caught the attention of participants, and is sure to be on their minds as Foresight consultations continue through March and April. Whatever the final conclusions turn out to be, the debate is underway!
To learn more about how the ETF's work on Skills for Smart Specialisation, see Skills for Smart Specialisation on OpenSpace (link) which has links to sector specific pages such as woodworking and furniture design (link), advanced manufacturing (link) etc. with many more resources from VET providers, public and private, from the EU and ETF partner countries alike.
1336 1818 As the national experts on the assignment, I invite you to contribute to the conversation.
Good news!
For my part I would like to thank all the participants, I think it was a very interesting and varied discussion. When business and government meet, there is always a risk that the differences of opinion will not be properly resolved. However, this time we managed to reach an agreement and put together the puzzle of the problem and its solution. It is always a pleasure to be there, where synergy and a common vision emerge from different opinions. It is obvious that only in efficient cooperation can each side succeed. I think that this result is largely due to the great examples of effective cooperation between business and education in the Netherlands and Estonia, for which special thanks go to our colleagues.
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