NATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS FRAMEWORK DEVELOPMENT IN RUSSIA IN LIGHT OF BEST FOREIGN PRACTICE

Well-known international reports of the ILO, UN, ETF, OECD emphasize that national qualification frameworks is an important mechanism bridging the gap between labour market and vocational educational services market. Currently NQFs are implemented in more than 100 countries all over the world. Despite certain examples of NQF implementation in some cultural and socio-economic frameworks NQF is still believed to be highly crucial for developing countries. The article deals with some arguments that stress the importance of NQF choice versus dual education what is conditioned on by 2 factors. The first one is an acute necessity to satisfy economy’s demand with skilled workforce. The second is an innovative economy development with human resources inclined to lifelong learning. However some experts claim that Russia is losing its scores on international arena. Authors appeal to the best foreign practice analysis dealing with NQF implementation abroad. Constant tracing of new trends, challenges result in new qualifications and programmes development. That is how an applied bachelor was introduced in Australia, the UK, France or recognition of prior learning in Australia. Russia is also introducing applied bachelor degree, a new form of vocational education. By the year 2020 50% of secondary vocational education graduates and 30% of tertiary vocational education graduates will have received applied bachelor degree. It is highly important that NQF would not hinder but facilitate organizational changes within the education process.

Research methodology is based upon the ILO research in 15 countries aimed at NQF design, implementation and evaluation. The ILO research embraces 15 countries including Russia. It is getting obvious that both NQF implementation and evaluation in Russia are unsuccessful. Methods widely applied in the research are comparative analysis and cabinet studies (international and Russian conceptual documents analysis including ILO, UN, ETF, OECD reports).

The research objective is to prove that it is highly necessary to amend legal framework for Russian economy dealing including legal basis of employers qualifications, both NQF development and implementation, occupation outlooks, qualifications certification. NQF development is a collective responsibility of both state and business.

In order to conclude comparative analysis has shown that currently Russia is facing difficulties with NQF development, first of all in terms of practical and organizational issues. To overcome these obstacles is possible due to foreign practice incorporating which help Russia to develop NQF preserving its peculiar traits in competence-based approach implementation. Quite obvious that dual system is much more expensive to implement in Russia because of very week connections between a state, business and VET. From this point of view, NQF is a good tool for bridging labour market and VET. Moreover, skills projection is considered to be a vital part of NQF development. Thanks to that the NQF helps to solve labour market mismatch. But NQF is to be developed further including normative framework upgrade, sectorial qualifications frameworks development, standards unification.