Specialists in Modern Russia: Socio-Demographic Composition and Key Problems

The goal of the article is to identify the main trends in the socio-demographic composition of highly qualified specialists and to determine the issues for the development of Russian society that arise from these trends. The empirical foundation for the study is a representative sample of the 27th wave of RLMS – HSE. The article shows that the group of highly qualified Russian specialists is characterized by such socio-demographic specifics of its composition as gender asymmetry with the group’s increasing feminization, escalating dominance of relatively young ages (up to 40 years), and concentration of its representatives mainly in the regional capitals. Among the other features of this group are its high heterogeneity in terms of the professional training level of its members and the enormous gaps in their income level, especially in large cities. It is demonstrated that behind all of these features is the complex intertwining of different types of inequalities, as well as an increasingly widening imbalance between the number of people with higher education and the number of workplaces for them in the economy. As a result, although the number of employment opportunities for specialists in Russia is now almost 1.5 times lower than the number of people with higher education, more than one in five of those who occupy these jobs do not have a higher education diploma. At the same time, a rapid increase in the proportion of people with higher education among the unemployed is occurring. A conclusion is drawn that structural imbalances which are demonstrated by the overproduction of people with higher education and unreasonably deep gaps in the income of specialists, as well as in the mismatch of their specializations in universities with the availability of corresponding jobs that are attractive to them, have created a “qualification pit” in relation to them, leading to deepened intergroup differentiation among specialists. This situation not only directly affects the prospects for the successful development of the Russian economy, but also requires adjustments in state social policy.