The Supplementary Vocational Education for Advanced Technological Development: The Contribution Og Higher Education Instituts

The article is a study of the current and prospective markets for supplementary vocational education in Russia, including the key areas of technological development and the place of universities at these markets. The market of supplementary vocational education is highly competitive, gradually developing thanks to the growth in the number of providers of educational programmes and courses, as well as due to the emergence of new educational formats (online courses, distance education). In the nearest future, the main competition at the market of extra-budgetary supplementary vocational education will be among the universities for the funds of companies (organizations) that improve the skills of their employees in the field of promising technological areas. The article in this regard aims at assessing the scale of the supplementary vocational education market, in particular its financial aspect, the place of universities in it, as well as the identification of promising directions and forms of the supplementary vocational education development. The study is based on official statistics, monitoring, and sample surveys. The situation that has developed in the sphere of supplementary vocational education is considered at the macro- and micro-levels. First, there have been identified trends at the Russian supplementary vocational education market, including financial parameters, the typology of students, the relative popularity of various types of supplementary vocational education, and the place of universities as supplementary vocational education providers. At the micro-level, the scale and parameters of demand at the supplementary vocational education market for promising technological areas are analyzed. The study showed that nowadays the supply from Russia universities exceeds the demand, although the market for extra-budgetary supplementary vocational education is quite large, five times larger than the budgetary supplementary vocational education. An assessment of the market segment specializing in promising, including cross-cutting digital technologies, showed that this market is quite narrow compared to the total extra-budgetary supplementary vocational education, and there dominate a limited number of universities to be competed with by leading companies developing corporate supplementary vocational education (especially in data science). Prospects for the development of this market are associated not only with new appearing forms of distance education, but also with various types of cooperative and network supplementary vocational education programmes of cooperative university-and-company development and implementation. At the same time, new state programmes and national projects (such as «The Digital Economy of the Russian Federation», «New Opportunities for Everyone», the national project «Science», and Competence Centres of the National Technology Initiative) can provide an additional impetus to the development of supplementary vocational education. The limitations of the study are related to the conventions and assumptions in the calculations connected with lacking detailed information on the financial aspects of the extra-budgetary supplementary vocational education. The results of the study may be of interest for specialists dealing with educational problems, for higher educational institutions developing supplementary vocational education programmes, as well as for companies interested in developing their own system of supplementary education and in cooperation with universities. Keywords: supplementary vocational education, higher education institutions, sources of funding, perspective technological directions, Russia