NINA N. ANISKINA YARIPK, Jaroslavl, Rusija
SUMMARY The lack of efficient monitoring of labor market and its tendencies forecast in Russia results in quality management of educational institutions according to indirect data which are weakly correlated with the satisfaction degree of the future customer of the specialists. Consequently, in educational institutions there appear problems with the understanding of ISO 9000 standards philosophy and that is why with the introduction of systems of quality management (SQM). It also results, within the frames of higher education, in mass multiplication of such standards which are far from ISO 9000 philosophy and from international approaches in quality management. The article deals with the issues of introduction into the Russian practice of professional standards as the means of clarifying the consumers requirements, it includes the differentiation of the notions “consumer” and “customer” in the sphere of education, the labor market demands are analyzed on the basis of “competency”. Taking that into account there is a requirement formulated to be included in academic projects which comprises the block of common for the customers requirements and requirements for the academic programmes and conditions of application the knowledge, skills and habits in practical activity. It serves as the basis for recommendations to educational institutions to apply the project approach in formulating the academic programmes and including consulting into them. To introduce the project approach into education it is recommended to combine the efforts of enterprises and educational institutions of all levels to create corporate universities. The experience of SQM in Russian educational establishments is analyzed, and the possibility of quality management for the whole system of education is considered.
PROBLEMS AND EXPERIENCE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF QUALITY MANAGEMENT IN INSTITUTIONS OF PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION
Key words: quality system in educational institution, project approach, corporate universities.
Professional education in Russia is being developed through two systems: basic education, including institutions of elementary, middle (MEI) and higher education (HEI); and the system of supplementary professional education. The consumer of the system of professional education is labor market. Therefore, speaking about the development of quality management in professional education we should, first of all, be oriented to the demands of labor market as the main consumer of the system product. Though, if we trace how a student rises up the steps within the system, the
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inner consumer – an educational establishment of the next level – should be taken into consideration too. How is the problem of quality management in professional education developed in Russia nowadays? Traditionally, the state has been a mediator between labor market and system of professional education in Russia and controlled the process of their interaction through the system of educational standards, selection of students on every main subject, and, for a long time, even through their distribution to work. The situation changed drastically in the early 90-ies when the branch system of qualification improvement was let out to “free voyage”. Then, for the first time educational establishments were faced with the question –What is our consumer ready to pay for? And as this question didn’t long arise before the establishments of basic professional education (until now the majority of them do not view labor market as their consumer), the essence of quality management was understood differently at different levels of professional education. Institutions of supplementary professional education have always been in direct contact with customer companies. So for them even without monitoring and forecasting labor market demands, the probability and price of error were not as high as, for example, for higher school. There were two main reasons for that. Firstly, the life cycle of educational service here is much longer; that allows them to adjust to the market, even in the absence of forecast, for it’s possible to take correcting measures. Secondly, traditionally there haven’t been any national standards in SPE, which regardless of their importance would become one more factor to slow down the respond of higher school to changes in the market. That brought to the situation when even the institutions advanced in the theory of quality management face a lot of difficulties in building up their systems. One more problem is becoming obvious. “Fashion” on quality management, popularity of ISO Standards in the marker urge higher institutions on establishing new main subjects, including scientific. As a result, these higher institutions, with the rare exceptions when the team of enthusiastic teachers go on trying to build their own system of quality management, produce in great number ISO 9000 Standards that have practically nothing in common with policy and practice of international approaches to quality
management. Thus, it’s very difficult, with the present level of forecasting, to predict future demands of the rapidly changing labor market; and it’s extremely difficult to include all these changes into educational standards timely. Thus, to control the quality of basic professional education is possible only in some indirect indicators of level of the acquired qualification. This problem could be solved in Russia if the system of professional standards were introduced as it’s done in the economically developed countries. Professional standards, as a certain set of competencies for the key economic professions, might become the base for the customer to elaborate on their requirements. These requirements present in themselves multi-leveled model of profession, a minimum choice of qualification requirements and corresponding knowledge, abilities and skills. Now in Russia the standard for the profession “Manager of in-company training” is introduced, the development of standards for the professions “Manager of innovative activities” and “Quality Manager” has been completed. The concept of another standard for general profession of manager is in work that will synthesize concrete standards into a general model. Professional standards are the basis for the development of educational standards and the system of voluntary personnel certification. However, the process of developing the professional standard system, started at the level of government a few years ago, has been suspended recently. At the same time SPE has also problems relating to determining requirements. The customer isn’t always capable to formulate the set of necessary competencies, and the order, at best, takes a confused poorly structured form. Then, the analysis of the task and collaborative work on designing a training program for students, appropriate for this task, becomes an important part of educational institution’s activity. It’s worse when the company is sure that they know who must be taught, what and how, but their confidence isn’t based on a deep analysis of performance goals and requirements to competencies corresponding to these goals. In this situation it’s very likely that the customer won’t be content even if an educational service is of high quality. Here the important for the system of education difference between two ideas - “Customer” and “Consumer” - becomes clear. As a rule, the customer pays for the service. In principle, he is not much interested in the quality of educational
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process. For him it’s important to know whether his representative, a direct consumer, has acquired competencies necessary for the customer. The analysis of contentment made by the majority of educational institutions has the form of a questionnaire for students who often assess the program from the viewpoint that greatly differs from that of a customer. The demands in personnel training are more or less examined now by many of the organizations. At the level of workers or engineering staff the companies are starting to solve this problem by certifying positions. However, position certification has no system and methodical support doesn’t exist either. Some large enterprises that introduced processoriented systems of quality management consider personnel training to be an element of the entire process of their development. The main strategic aim in the process of professional development of staff is accumulating organizational competencies. Along with that they try to assess the final contribution of the process of personnel development to the success of the company from the viewpoint of business effectiveness in general, not of a separate group’s advance after their qualification improvement. But, normally, the analysis of demands isn’t connected with determination of the competencies necessary for solution of the stated goals and achievement of company’s purposes. Companies need consulting and educational support in the process of determining competencies, necessary for the solution of the tasks they set, and at the administrative and management level they often need assistance in setting goals for the enterprise as well. However the majority of professional education
institutions (especially of the basic education), developing their systems of quality management, do not take responsibility for project-consulting work on identification and assessment of initial competencies of their will-be-students and of those competencies they are supposed to get. As a rule, this work is not included into a life cycle of an educational service. In accordance with their concept they at best assess contentment of their contingent with the program contents and the way it was taught. They do not analyze the customer’s requirements concerning competencies, the trainees’ capabilities to apply the acquired knowledge to practice and improvement of their motivation to actual changes. To control the quality of long-life professional education (always remembering the goal – to guarantee competitiveness), in the first hand, it’s necessary to add to the training project a separate section of the joint work, including identification of requirements to the training program, to be realized by an educational institution, and also to the conditions for applying the acquired knowledge, abilities and skills to practice, to be created by the customer himself. These processes go beyond the boundaries of traditional education and lay the basis for the union of educational process and consulting. To correlate the training programs with the strategic directions of companies’ development at the level of tactics and to polish the methodology of the project approach to training is the most important condition for the development of highquality management in education. The scheme of consulting and education project on supplying a new strategic direction with necessary competencies is given in Figure 1.
Fig.1 Organization of the personnel development process by involving into strategical projects
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It is most difficult to implement this approach in the institutions of higher professional education as the higher education standards are more conservative in regards to the market. Consequently, to the aims of quality management identification of the processes of higher level is of prior importance, in which the educational establishment ( issuing chair) and the enterprise are involved, hiring its graduates of the corresponding area. The organizer of such kind of collaboration and the master of this mutual process can be establishments of supplementary professional training, which have already had some positive experience of the similar projects with the market bodies. The efficient scheme of such mutual process and the adjustment of the personnel development aims to the business matters and corporate commandments is training while working by means of including educational programmes into the process of working on the projects. The way of optimal combination of different resources, instruments and suppliers (partners) of services on the matter of corporate intellectual power development is the creation of corporate universities (CU). The model of the corporate university becomes the link between the company and the outside market of professional development. Total adoption of quality management systems in the industrial sphere contributes to the arising of new understanding of quality in the sphere of professional training, first of all the supplementary one. Beware of the fact that the educational service should be given in one package with the consulting and documented as a project, educational establishments started to form corporate universities with the larger structure of functions, including in its activity not only single company but a wide variety of their corporate clients and scientific-productional organizations. CU allows to integrate the higher school resources, supplementary professional education system and industrial enterprises so that to provide systematic non-stop personnel potential development of all parties based on the modern informational technologies, innovational methodology achievements, process consulting, project approach, psychology and adult pedagogics. This form of organization of non-stop professional training creates common environment of both teachers and trainees development in the process of their collaboration or, in other words, the environment of common activity aimed at the solving of the problems of each interested party.
The transition to the project organization of the professional training is based , firstly, on the reconsidering of , firstly, the quality criteria system, secondly, educational establishment functions structure, and thirdly, the requirements of the competency of the personnel, fulfilling educational projects. The absence of logically built tree of aims from the top to the bottom, starting from the federal level of education management to the final customer of the results on the level of enterprises and organizations is today the main system barrier. It is clear that implementation of this concept is a long and hard process, the difficulty of it lies within the tradition and mentality of educational public. That is why, developing their own quality management systems, educational establishments should describe the above mentioned tasks at least on the strategic processes level. To provide the quality of professional education in accordance with the offered concept in the management system of the educational establishments the basic one is the process of development management of business and professional personnel competencies of actual and potential employer. This process together with the supporting processes of an educational establishment should be provided with the corresponding processes within the structures of the employer, the society, the state. Since it is necessary to create common area of potential trainees development, educational establishments and organizations-employers (in a broader sense - system of non-stop professional education and labour market) in the process of their collaboration and problem solving by each of the interested parties. This logic is the basis of inserting the quality management principles being applied in a real section of economics into the concept of non-stop professional education and transition to corporate management systems of a higher level. The first steps in this direction have already been undertaken. Upon the projects of quality management systems many higher educational establishments have started to work. There is a positive experience In Siberian and Tomsk State Universities: they have got certification for their quality systems according to international standard GOST R ISO 9001:2001. In the area of supplementary professional education the quality management system of Yaroslavl Institute of Qualification Improvement of managers and professionals of oil and oil-chemical industry has been internationally acknowledged. Before inserting and certifying of their quality management systems the mentioned above institutions have gone
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through a long evolution from spreading education and consulting in the sphere of quality to creating in their own structure certain bodies for personnel certification in this sphere and /or organization quality management systems. In accordance with the requirements of ISO 9000 standards an organization, beside its mission and strategic aims definitions, should state its organizational characteristics in certain time intervals (the so called vision), separate strategic aims according to levels of management, take on commandments in the sphere of quality and formulate them like the policy which is approved and understood by its personnel. The basis of qualified management is the production of an organization activity like a system of interconnected processes. Within the frames of the educational establishment or a certain structure of education management the task of the activity processes identification is clear enough. But when rising in the whole to the level of non-stop education system to reveal and describe all the processes, to correlate all the inputs and outputs, to cut clear the responsibilities can be rather a problem for a serious analysis. A separate point while forming quality management system for non-stop professional education is its adaptation to the requirements of each level of system documentation. The documentation should have common principles of its structure, statements, conceptual approaches to describe interconnection of the documents in the system. Of specific importance is the possibility to follow the actions done in the process of the work itself. It is extremely important while auditing the management system. Besides, the possibility of registration of quality processes allows to analyze and evaluate regularly deviations at every process step, applying statistics methods as well. But the difference of the aims and criteria of efficiency evaluation and results of the processes at different levels of education management brings out additional requirements to the system documentation. The fundamental principle of quality management in the system of professional education is providing the non-stop improvement. First of all, every process is concerned and consequently all the educational establishment activity in the context of
its relations with labour market. Without ability to measure the efficiency and results of the work it is impossible to achieve the system transparent and easy to manage. Since the main responsibility for the quality of professional education lies upon the process of research and forecasting the demand of the labour market, of particular person and society in general.
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SAŽETAK PROBLEMI I ISKUSTVA U RAZVOJU UPRAVLJANJA KVALITETOM U INSTITUCIJAMA PROFESIONALNOG OBRAZOVANJA Zbog slabog nadzora nad tržištem rada i njegovim trendovima upravljanje kvalitetom u obrazovnim institucijama u Rusiji vođeno je posrednim podacima kojima se dobiva loša i nepotpuna slika o potrebama i zahtjevima potencijalnih klijenata. Otuda se javlja problem nerazumijevanja filozofije ISO 9000 normi kod obrazovnih institucija zbog čega uvođenje sustava upravljanja kvalitetom postaje nužno. Također dolazi, u visokom obrazovanju, i do masovnog umnožavanja standarda koji su daleko od filozofije ISO 9000 i od međunarodnih stremljenja u upravljanju kvalitetom. Ovaj članak se bavi pitanjima uvođenja profesionalnih standarda u rusku praksu, normi kojima će se omogućiti bolje razumijevanje zahtijeva tržišta. Članak također pravi razliku između pojmova “klijent” i “korisnik” u sferi obrazovanja. Također se predlaže i uvođenje projektnog pristupa u formuliranju akademskih programa. Preporučuje se kreiranje korporativnih sveučilišta koja bi nastala kao rezultat suradnje poduzeća i obrazovnih institucija na svim razinama. Analizira se iskustvo SQM u ruskom obrazovnom establišmentu te se razmatra mogućnost upravljanja kvalitetom za čitav sistem obrazovanja.
Ključne riječi: sustav kvalitete u obrazovnim institucijama, projektni pristup, korporativno sveučilište