Spending 600m rubles, Nikolai Nikiforov’s birthplace will prepare IT specialists of Tatarstan
One of the six federal interregional competence centres will be created in Tatarstan
There will be created six interregional competence centres – educational organizations – as preparation for the coming vocational education and skills excellence event WorldSkills 2019 that will take place in Kazan. The centre, which will work in IT sphere, will be based on Kazan Electrical Technical School, where the Minister of Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation Nikolai Nikiforov started his career as IT specialist. According to the results of a competition organized by the Ministry of Education of Russia, the republic was chosen as a place for competitions in IT.
600m for competence
In 2016-2017, it is planned to expend 300m rubles from the budget of Tatarstan and 300m from the federal budget on interregional competence centre of Kazan. Tatiana Kamaletdinova, the executive director of the Centre of Information Technologies of Tatarstan, which is a subordinate unit of the Ministry of Information and communication, told about the project. She explained why it was an IT centre and told about its work.
'It is not a secret that IT is a leading sphere in our republic. So, we were offered this proposal. To tell the truth, we thought about this centre earlier, and we were working on it in another way. The association dealt with new standards in vocational education. Then I was offered to head it as a sector. Now this association includes over 100 educational institutions of Russia in IT. All this big group of teachers will think how to change our federal standards with the intention of making our graduate student enter the sector and be competitive in competitions like WorldSkills,' told Kamaletdinova.
Initially, it was planned that the centre would be situated in Innopolis. But then the decision was to create it at Kazan Electrical Technical School.
Internship in Samsung
Under the auspices of the competence centre there will be following professions: network and system administrator, web-designer, video editing, graphic design, mobile robot technician, printers, IT software solutions for business, access network installation. In a word, all specialities are controlled by the Ministry of Communication and Mass Media expect robotics that is supervised by the Ministry of Industry and Trade.
However, according to the executive director of the Centre of Information Technologies, in the process it became clear that Tatarstan had no experience in some of these eight areas. 'We have robotics because we put our mind to it: we found such a robot in the Republic of Tatarstan – in Almetyevsk – and just begged the company to teach the children.'
By the way, the centre has many things to do if it is going to provide the technical schools with robots that cost 1,5mand are used in competitions. It was decided to start with specialists — three guys of Kazan will go to Korea for 1,5-year internship.
Will we have enough participants in WorldSkills?
Despite the requests of ministries and judges of the competitions, in Korea as well as in Kazan schoolchildren are still aspiring to higher education, while industry of the whole world urgently needs intermediate specialists.
The participant must be between the age of 17 and 23, but some skills have the age limit of 16 and 25. It means that these 'potential specialists' are 14-15 years now. Andrey Pominov, the first deputy Minister of Education, says that today we can obtain good results in 15-17 skills while they are 50 in total. It is surprising that we pin our hopes not only on turning and construction but also on landscape gardening, cooking and hairdressing.
'For instance, the national team of the Russian Federation in São Paolo did not participate in all 50 skills, but took part at least in 20 areas. The thing is that not just the winners of the national competitions can compete in the contest; a participant of WorldSkills is to qualify and score a certain quantity of points. It is possible that a region won't have participants in some skills,' Pominov concluded.
Not only Samsung is a supplier of ready laboratories on the grounds that Tatarstan is dreaming of having the best workers. Tatneft, KAMAZ, Ford Sollers, Tattelecom are also preparing personnel for themselves. The latter company organizes career development courses for their workers using the equipment designed for students.
As Pominov says, WorldSkills' committee is going to pay a validation visit in February-March, but it will take place in Moscow. We don't know when it will be in Kazan and what the city will show it because the Ministry doesn't want to comment on Kazan Expo.
It should be noted that the Centre of Information Technologies of the Republic of Tatarstan – the main developer of the portal of the government of the republic – can be called the Minister of Communication and Mass Media of Russia Nikolai Nikiforov's birthplace. He headed CIT from 2006 to 2010 and at that time joined Rustam Minnikhanov's team, and in 2009, he joined the Russian President's list. Nikiforov moved from CIT to the Cabinet of Ministers and became the vice-PM of Information and Communication of Tatarstan. It is obvious that to day, the strong ties between the federal Minister and CIT of Tatarstan are preserved and maintained.