The article is devoted to the capabilities of the modern education system to resist challenges in a situation of instability. The article analyzes the problematic situations that the education system may face, considers the specifics of entrepreneurial education and assesses its possibility from the point of view of finding a specialist's relative stability in the labor market.
competence, qualifications, entrepreneurial education, instability
The relevance of research
The year 2020 has become a kind of challenge to the established and habitual forms of life: for the first time in the last hundred years, humanity is faced with a pandemic. The education system today is going through a period unique in its complexity and ambiguity (VUCA): a period of changing educational eras. This is a logical consequence of the development and implementation of digital technologies in all spheres of human life, which could not affect “our universities”. K. Robinson wrote that the old paradigm of education is living out its last days, that some completely different future awaits us, but no one knows which one [16]. Too obvious categoricality is inherent in this position, which may well cause not only indifference, but also rejection of ideas and concepts “lowered from above”. In this regard, the education system should not lose what is considered to be the classics of education. None of the most progressive technologies can replace “live” communication between a teacher and a student, general erudition cannot and should not be lost against the background of “progressive” competencies.
Analytical controversy
A modern university as an institution of society has every opportunity not only to look into the future, but also to design it. At the same time, it still largely continues to use ideas and concepts that were relevant in the past. We are waiting for new fashionable ideas - in clothes, new technological possibilities - for cars, better food composition - for products, forgetting that no breakthrough can occur without changing the existing one and creating a new reality, a reality in which specialists will begin to enter the labor market. , owning relevant and demanded competencies.
In the study “Russia 2025: From Personnel to Talents” [15], carried out by the Boston Consulting Group with the support of Sberbank, WorldSkills Russia and Global Education Futures, the figure of 10 million people looks remarkable and even somewhat shocking. It is precisely such a shortage of new specialists in the "knowledge economy" - capable of working with creative tasks, with the challenges of the future - that Russia will see on the labor market in the next 5 years.
The shortage of personnel and qualifications gives rise to another problem of modern education - the inconsistency of competencies in the "employer-employee" link. According to the Hays Global Labor Market Index [18], the increasing mismatch between workers 'competencies and employers' requirements remains one of the key labor market problems for all major economies in the world. The question becomes urgent: how and what to teach a modern student? In search of an answer to it, it is important not to forget and always prioritize the prestige of the teaching profession, its value for society. The academic community should not allow the transformation of the education sector into the service sector, when the “paying” for the service dictates and decides how and what to study, with the help of what pedagogical technologies he will receive knowledge, promoting the concept of “the client is always right”. No matter how “modern” and adapted the sphere of education becomes, the teacher and the student should always be on “opposite sides of the barricades”. Only in this case we will receive an education based on respect and experience, when the word “teacher” is equal to “mentor”, without ironic meanings and shades.
It is possible to become a truly effective teacher if there is a developed scientific infrastructure, appropriate motivation, a decent level of material incentives and, no matter how banal, free time. Time free from classroom work, the time that can actually be spent on research, quality testing and implementation of the results. The “effective contract” actively implemented in many Russian universities is most often only a quantitative assessment of the results of a teacher's labor activity, but is practically deprived of the opportunity to conduct a qualitative analysis of professional achievements. After all, formally an associate professor with five "VAK" publications is better than another associate professor with four, or one associate professor with a patented new technology, because there is only one. To assess the quality of published materials, their "breakthrough" nature or lack thereof, resource intensity and relevance of the research, take into account the level and status of the journal in which the article is published, its rating, as a rule, there is no one. The attestation commission looks formally at the positions of candidates, expressed in absolute values.
A modern teacher now plays various roles: a lecturer, a tutor, a digital curator, a mentor, an analyst, a content manager, a student who himself is constantly learning new things, and so on, which predetermines the expansion of boundaries and the search for new opportunities for "broadcasting" competencies and "learning ".
Without open science, it is impossible to solve the problem of entering the top ten countries with high-quality education by 2024 - it was set by President V. Putin back in 2018 - it is impossible. Meanwhile, the previous ambitious project in this area - the 5-100 project, which assumed the entry of five Russian universities into the top hundred of the world's universities by 2020 - did not achieve its goal. You can follow the path of shifting responsibility and looking for blame for the fact that Russia is still not the leader of the educational market. And you can ask the question, what is competence? The answer to this question is very clearly given by B.D. Elkonin: “Competence is when I can turn some knowledge into a means of constructing a new action”. This means in the modern world is entrepreneurial education.
Possible solutions to the problem
In search of relative stability, consumers are showing increased interest in this area of training. The state, in turn, should be interested in the accessibility of entrepreneurial education, as it helps to reveal the entrepreneurial potential of young people [1, 2], stimulates entrepreneurial activity, which helps to reduce unemployment and increase the welfare of the population [6].
One of the characteristics of modern education is the transformation of universities from traditional research to entrepreneurial universities [13], which actualizes the need for the development of entrepreneurial educational programs.
The process of learning entrepreneurship involves mastering entrepreneurial competencies [13]. A number of researchers [1, 4] focus on the importance of consolidating entrepreneurial competencies in practice, since it is the absence or insufficiency of practical orientation that makes education too theoretical, not adapted to modern market needs.
At the same time, the concept of entrepreneurial education is constantly being improved through the development and implementation of new technologies for teaching entrepreneurship. An innovative approach to actualizing the professional competencies of students is to involve them in the creation of start-ups on the basis of universities - dynamically developing companies focused on making a profit from the introduction of modernized or new commercial products to the market [14].
Startups can be used as a tool for the formation and development of professional competencies of students, but this requires compliance with a number of conditions. The university should take the initiative to create a regional startup ecosystem, form a university entrepreneurial network that includes students and alumni, open its own crowdfunding platform, and launch a startup factory.
An urgent issue is the creation of a university crowdfunding platform that allows attracting investment resources for the implementation of the selection stages of start-up projects, as well as the search for additional sources of funding for scientific research at the university, the development of new entrepreneurial educational programs.
In order for universities to be able to effectively use such a tool for consolidating and updating students' professional competencies as startups, a number of conditions must be met.
First, the university should take the initiative to create and become an integrator of a regional startup ecosystem, which will become a link between startups, business incubators, accelerators, technology parks, technology transfer centers, legal and accounting outsourcing companies, business angels, crowdfunding platforms, venture capital funds. , mentors, businessmen and other subjects of the entrepreneurial environment [7, 9, 14].
Second, a university entrepreneurial network should be created. Business networks are digital platforms for building business relationships, identifying, developing or exploiting economic opportunities, exchanging information and finding potential business partners [8]. These are business social networks that help entrepreneurs expand their business interests by forming mutually beneficial business relationships [12]. Entrepreneurial networks are a valuable strategic intangible resource for the implementation of startups [5].
Third, it is necessary to organize a startup factory. Developments obtained as a result of university research can be used as ideas for the implementation of startups. It is rational to use the concept of "lean startup" [10], developed [11]. This concept assumes a detailed preliminary modeling of all stages of a startup project in order to weed out projects in advance that, with a high degree of probability, will not be able to be completed due to their economic inefficiency. This approach will ensure the rational use of financial resources attracted by the university to create startups. Considering that the startup factory simultaneously implements several start-up projects, and the business environment for the implementation of start-up projects is dynamic and complex, it becomes necessary to apply new approaches to modeling the stages of implementation of start-up projects [3].
Prospects for development and study
It is promising to study the possibilities of differentiating the stages of the implementation of start-up projects and the conditions for the transition from one stage of the project to another depending on the type of startup (for example, for high-tech startups, social startups, Internet startups, and others).
The question still remains debatable: is entrepreneurship a set of specific personality traits or is it a set of skills that can be learned? In our opinion, entrepreneurial skills can be mastered by getting an entrepreneurial education [13]. It should be noted that the list of professional competencies of an entrepreneur does not remain unchanged, it is constantly supplemented by more and more new competencies, which is associated with the continuous technological progress of social production. The importance of maintaining the level of professional training determines the need to continue training a person throughout his life.
The profile of professional competencies and skills will change as the emergence of the digital economy will lead to the formation of a new type of entrepreneurship - digital entrepreneurship. In this regard, today it is necessary to shift the focus and make the mastering of competencies in the field of e-commerce a higher priority, which should be reflected in the programs of entrepreneurial education.
Main conclusions
At all times, education has been an integral part of human life: part of work, creativity, family, play, love and any other human affairs. In the VUCA-world, one cannot shift responsibility for one's own life and one's development solely to external forces (to the school, teachers, parents) [17]. As long as schools and institutions perform mainly supervisory and punitive functions, we will not be able to come to an understanding of the value of self-development. Striving to minimize responsibility for the quality of our career path makes us passive consumers of knowledge, and not actively seeking users.
The modern generation (millennials and generation Z) is most adapted to the need to constantly “keep abreast”, it is easier to master new information technologies, these people were born in the era of digitalization: a one-year-old child holds a pacifier in one hand, a smartphone in the other (and this is no longer is an exaggeration), while the existing workforce is increasingly in need of retraining and retraining.
The Atlas of New Professions [17] is ruthless: 57 professions, according to its creators - the Agency for Strategic Initiatives and Skolkovo - are doomed to disappear and fall into a career dead end. Managers, administrators, lawyers, drivers, dispatchers, operators, economists, accounting and procurement specialists, cashiers and others - until 2030 will begin to lose their jobs at different rates if they do not undergo additional training. What should a new specialist have? Bob Johansen, in his book Leaders Create the Future: Ten New Qualities for an Uncertain World, noted that VUCA situations and situations can coexist organically using the VUCA approach:
Vision (vision) - is provided through constant communication with other people, team activities. One in the field is not a warrior today.
Understanding - it is not enough to see the situation and discuss it, you need to understand it, and this requires an open and pure mind.
Clarity - for the mind to be clean, everything must be clear and understandable, simplified to the limit, sorted out, systematized.
Agility (agility) - in the VUCA-world you need to think quickly, make decisions quickly and act quickly.
World-class education researchers (for example, Michael Barber, an English educational expert) note that soon humanity will face a new peak in educational activity due to an increase in life expectancy: after reaching retirement age, many will need retraining to stay active and form new relevant competencies. To implement the model of education of the future, a developed high-tech infrastructure will be required, one of the elements of which will be quickly updated databases based on BigData technologies. Michael Barber notes that an individual approach will be placed at the center of the educational process - curricula will be formed by the students themselves.
It is people with developed thinking and high-quality skills that will become the highest value of the new knowledge economy for us. Whether this will become our main limitation or our new opportunity depends entirely on how competently and logically the new education system will be built, which will become not only a beautiful idea, or exclusively fragmentary experience and practice (like, for example, a simulator of the Skolkovo educational ecosystem), but it will also be embodied in real life, without becoming a "simulator" of education.
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