State of human capital of the Russian professionals

Abstract

The main issue of the article is to analyze the state of Russian professionals’ human capital based on the data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey – Higher School of Economics (RLMS-HSE), 2019. The paper shows that in terms of a traditional interpretation of human capital (G. Becker), the professionals are significantly ahead of other groups of nonmanual workers, including managers. Russian professionals’ typical educational trajectories involve a greater number of years of study than other representatives of “white-collar” employment. Most of their education includes the completion of a high school and university; other trajectories are relatively rare and usually imply distant forms of higher education. To obtain additional professional education, professionals are many times more likely to use informal online training than formal professional courses. A characteristic feature of professionals is their strong differentiation in terms of the quality of general human capital. Their polar subgroups (persons who received full-time higher education by occupation, against persons without any higher education) are approximately equal in number. This means that the analysis of the quality of the Russian professionals’ general human capital involves the consideration of such additional criteria as the distance nature of higher education and its compliance with the occupation. It is these characteristics that not only strongly influence the volume of rents they receive on their human capital but also allow them to better understand the behavior of professionals in the labor market and their place in the social structure of Russian society.