SYNOPSIS: The author, Minister of Education of Perm region, briefly analyzes a current situation in the Perm vocational training; he names all the main goals to be achieved for the future success and some possible challenges and risks.

This year the meeting of the Teaching-Methodological Union of the Privolzhsky District in the city of Perm was held practically at the same time when we were able to announce the end of the primary adaptation of the regional educational system to the new socioeconomic conditions.

Today we are confident that the potential accumulated during the past years has provided stability to all the functions of the regional educational system and allowed to easily overcome any problems connected with the overall crisis. It goes without saying that the system of education being one of the social institutes and part of the national-economic complex also experiences all the negative influence of the deterioration of an economic conjecture. But we have managed to preserve all the key projects and programs which define the dynamics of the development of this branch and which provide continuity of modernization as necessary conditions of achieving new quality and availability of educational services together with the general efficiency of the educational sphere.

We are witnessing a stable development of every level of our educational system, more so in some areas we have managed to achieve new quality results and create fundamental conditions for growth.

So let me start with the positive results. The successful entrance of the Perm region into a Complex Project of Modernization of the General Education [CPMGE] has become a catalyst which seriously accelerated the development of the educational cluster as a whole. The concept of CPMGE that is oriented towards receiving valuable results in short terms, has become a unified tool to achieving success.

In the sphere of initial and secondary vocational training we have oriented ourselves towards an innovational project of involving employers into the process of forming and accommodating the state demands and tasks in the institutions of vocational training. The main purpose of this project is to harmonize dynamically functioning and developing markets of labor and occupations with the market of educational services, the latter being still at its initial formation. The system of the employers' demands for training qualified workers has stimulated and enhanced the validity of state demands in the sphere of initial and secondary vocational training because it was done on the basis of estimating real economic needs in certain types of personnel.

Activities and demands of the Human Resources departments of different enterprises directed towards a quality choice of an educational institution for training their potential employees promotes the formation of the competitive environment in the sphere of vocational training and as a result, it helps to improve quality of services and economic efficiency of this educational branch.

The participation of regional employers in the form of formulating their demands at the level of forming and accommodating state demands prepared all the necessary conditions and preconditions for creating a regional system of management of the professional prestige, for starting an institution of certifying the quality of educational services, and for an independent evaluation of the work of all the branches of vocational training. More so we see all the possible prerequisites necessary to further develop the system of vocational training in the region. This can become a complex project with the following goals:

• creating conditions for attracting and retaining highly qualified personnel in the system of primary and secondary vocational training, including ambitious young people who are ready and able for professional and educational self-realization;
• modernizing the material basis of the system of vocational training which will provide opportunities for advanced training using valid prognosis of the technological development of corresponding branches;
• optimizing the network of educational establishments in the system of vocational training together with introducing various organizational and legal types of educational establishments and developing a genuine competition based on an equal access to state demands and state resources. At the same time we will need to raise the responsibilities of any educational establishment for the quality of educational services regardless of its state or non-state status;
• introducing information technologies to the system of vocational training together with new educational strategies of distant learning and highly technological models of rendering services in this sphere;
• turning towards certifying management of the quality of educational services;
• providing potential and current students with an objective information about the quality of training, employment perspectives and further professional development on the basis of independent evaluation and publication of corresponding ratings;
• providing real access of highly professional counseling services to those who are just choosing a vocation, regardless of their place of living;
• organizing a competitive market of educational services to improve qualifications and professional retraining of the instructors and managers of vocational training institutions.

We should also pay separate attention to the purposeful training of those groups and categories from young people who happen to find themselves in difficult life situations.
Now let me address some challenges and risks.

First, if we don't start modernizing the system of vocational training today we might easily be late to prepare it for a post-crisis stage of developing markets. Second, in the opinion of experts and specialists, there exist insuperable problems in the whole system of vocational training which cannot be solved without the total system's transformation:

• old-fashioned material-technical base;
• negatively motivating system of reimbursing professional labor;
• inefficient use of available resources;
• absence of clarity in developing human potentials;
• absence of socioeconomic factors of the cooperation between employers and institutions of vocational training;
• underdevelopment of the competition in the sphere of rendering vocational training services.

To realize the project in its full innovational potential we will need to work out and ratify a number of regional normative legal documents. The Ministry of Education of the Perm region is purposefully working towards this goal.