#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. At a discussion club meeting, experts from the Project Office for the Arctic Development (POAD) tried to find an answer to the question of how to increase human capital in the Arctic. Recently, at St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a figure was announced: in order to ensure the technological sovereignty of Russia, according to the most conservative estimate, at least a million new labor resources are needed.
POAD director general Alexander Stotsky recalled the study Socio-Psychological Factors of Migration in the Russian Arctic Regions. More than half of the respondents – 59% – answered that they did not plan to change jobs and would continue to work in the Arctic. Another 43% of the respondents are not going to change their place of residence to another, non-Arctic region, but at the same time, 19% of them hope that their children will still leave for warmer climes.
“It seems to me that the idea of creating anchor cities in the Arctic puts an end to many years of doubts about how we can develop the North – as a place for shift or a place to live”, portal goarctic.ru quotes the deputy chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Federal Structure, Regional Policy, Local Self-government and the North Affairs Anatoly Shirokov. – “The North is becoming a place of accumulation of a certain number of permanent population. I am not talking about indigenous peoples, because for them this is the territory of life, their homeland. We are talking about the accumulation of the population attracted to the Arctic zone. This immediately raises the need for a training system. Because just keeping an economically inactive person in the Arctic is expensive.”
The Arctic today requires specialists in various industries: mining, metallurgical, energy and fishing. Experts also call the development of hydrocarbon deposits on the Barents Sea shelf, the creation and development of science-intensive technologies and industries for the raw materials processing, and the defense complex strengthening as promising areas.
Aleksey Fadeev, executive director of the Polar Explorers Association of the Murmansk region, professor at the Graduate School of Industrial Management of St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, said that the need for personnel with secondary vocational education in the Murmansk region alone for 2022 was 26,000 people. Among them are managers and highly qualified specialists, as well as working specialties representatives: drillers, builders, welders, ship repairers, special equipment operators, dump truck drivers and others.
“A new challenge for companies is the rapid and explosive technology growth. Literally every day we hear about some kind of breakthrough technologies that are fundamentally changing the nature of competition in the industry on a global scale. And we need to learn how to respond to these challenges”, commented Maria Mazurina, head of methodology and sustainable development standards at Nornickel’s sustainable development department. – Among the critical technologies, we single out the industrial Internet of things, additive technologies, and blockchain. We respond to this by improving our employees’ skills. It is necessary to develop both digital skills and approaches to solving non-standard tasks by employees”.
According to the POAD Expert Council coordinator Alexander Vorotnikov, the interaction between the state and business will ensure the personnel training for the Russian Arctic.
“The issue of training workers is effectively addressed within the Professionalism program, when educational clusters are created with the business participation, with the state support. The training of highly qualified personnel will be carried out by world-class scientific and educational centers operating in the Russian Arctic, as well as by Russian universities that train specialists who want to work in the North. And here the role of university and inter-university campuses that are currently being created is important. At the same time, such mechanisms as the Arctic mortgage, as well as the Arctic concession will be used with federal funding”, said Alexander Vorotnikov.
As a reminder, on June 1, Nornickel was awarded the most significant federal award in the field of working with people – HR Brand of the Year by the recruitment company Headhunter.
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Text: Elena Popova, Photo: Nornickel press office, Nikolay Shchipko and Denis Kozhevnikov