Managing vocational education and the youth labour market in post-Soviet Russia

The paper assesses the impact of recent attempts to reform Russia's system of Initial Vocational Education and Training (IVET). Having become dislocated from industry after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vocational Training Colleges (Profuchilishche, or PU)1 1 During the Soviet era PU had the longer title of Professional'noe Tekhnicheskoe Uchilishche, or PTU, which provided the root for the slang term used to describe its students, ‘pe-te-ushniki’. recently became the subject of decentralizing reforms intended to make them more responsive to local labour market demand. Drawing on research conducted in the Ul'yanovsk region of Russia in 2004, the paper argues that in some respects the system has become more flexible. However, the reform process as a whole, particularly in its emphasis on ‘social partnership’, is too dependant on change taking place spontaneously. Qualitative change is further hindered by continuing efforts to engender an excessively close fit between labour market supply and demand, a tendency that owes its rationale to Soviet-era planning, and which ignores the way many graduates of PU approach their transitions into work.