Skills training and development: Russia in comparative perspective

The acquisition and maintenance of human capital are considered key drivers of productivity and economic growth. However, recent literature shows that in the case of Russia, this relationship is not obvious, which raises a question concerning the nature of human capital accumulation, despite the significant expansion of tertiary education in this country. The existing literature, much of it relying on a theory of market imperfections, tends to explain low incidences of training by the lack of employer incentives to invest in the human capital of their employees. This dissertation adds to this view confirming the negative role of ‘bad’ jobs and social origins in obstructing employees from skills development in BRIC-like countries. Skills training in Russia is constrained by stratifying occupational forces comprising jobs with low requirements to skills development, which conserves the working population in generic labour. This reveals the phenomenon of skills polarisation ‘at the bottom’ in a late-industrial country, thus, contributing to the growing critique of the knowledge society theory. For those few workers who occupy ‘good’ jobs, skills training is strongly linked to personal-specific traits, such as qualifications and computer and language skills; and this is common in both Russia and India. However, in contrast to Russia, India is still forming their knowledge society. This is confirmed by the statistically significant impact of socio-demographic origins (e.g. age, household size, marital status, and religion) on the incidence of training, which reveals a crucial role of ascription in human capital acquisition in contemporary India. The present thesis contributes to the growing literature on structural prerequisites for successful advancement and the contradictory development of the BRIC countries.