Strategies for Maintaining Employment and Professionalism among Russian Workers

Abstract

The Fourth Industrial Revolution and technological development contribute to shortening the service life of the competencies accumulated by employees and encourages them to acquire new or improve previously mastered knowledge, skills and abilities. The article deals with the problem of the involvement of the population in employment and its maintenance in the long term. In particular, the perception of modern workers of the current requirements in the labor market and their actions on self-management by professionalism are analyzed. The first part examines the concept of "new professionalism", which emphasizes the role of workers' competencies in achieving individual labor results. The second part of the article presents the results of a sociological survey of the working population in Russia. They showed that in the last decade, employment in Russia has been associated with a high degree of worker mobility, including significant breaks in work experience and frequent job changes. Breaks are more common for people starting and ending their working career. If breaks in work are more typical for women, then a change of place of work is for Russian men. The revealed specifics of employment obviously affect the perception and self-management of professionalism by employees. Both actions (breaks and job changes) are combined with a change of profession. If people voluntarily give up their current job, then, as a rule, the leading reasons are dissatisfaction with its professional aspects. On the contrary, excessive passivity is characteristic of those workers who are not going to change it. The existing system of vocational education in the country does not cover all employees who want to improve their competencies. There remains a significant resource that is covered by informal content. Professionalism in the perception of employees is more related to the need to master such competencies as handling information, stress tolerance, specialized knowledge and sociability. Employees also have an excess of knowledge and skills that are not involved in the current work. In general, employees are confident that the content of labor is currently being transformed in the employment system, unlike, for example, from the previous time, when the organization of labor, which now exists unchanged, was significant for the growth of labor productivity.