The Mismatch of Employee Competencies to Russian Labor Market Needs

The article examines how personnel shortages and the involvement of less competitive groups of workers affect Russia’s labor market. The theoretical section argues that the current skills shortage is due to a severe deficit of the required competencies among job seekers and that this is now becoming a socio-structural issue. Although in-demand competencies are lacking in the economy, many job seekers cannot find work. The elderly, youth, and women face the greatest challenges because their knowledge, skills, and capabilities deviate the most from the needs of the labor market. The second section of the article provides an empirical analysis of the diverse competencies of adults based on their group affiliation. This kind of assessment has been made possible by access to new sources of information and processing methods in the study. The article presents the author’s conceptual framework and methodology as well as the results of studying textual data from job postings and resumeś collected from the online job search platforms Headhunter, Zarplata.ru, and Rabota v Rossii from 2019 to 2023. A comprehensive (multi-layered) competency taxonomy and aggregated competency groups have been generated based on the documents collected that specify job requirements and the skills and knowledge described in resumes. The results of a statistical analysis indicate that the value of individual competencies in the Russian labor market may be assigned to three conceptual categories (elite, moderate, and economical). The analysis detected gender and age differences in the acquisition of these competencies by specific groups of job seekers. Another (unplanned) research result was the identification of several significant factors in the current increase in worker competency. Among the most significant of these at present are: lifelong accumulation of skills at work; obsolescence of individual skills; renewal of skills (or valorization of those that have been in low demand for a long time); complexity and simplicity in mastering skills (which segregates groups of employees); and favorable opportunities for job seekers to improve their skills.