Tamara Prytychenko

Employment of graduates of higher educational institutions (HEIs) is an important task worldwide. The main problems of employment are due to the existing discrepancy between the education re-ceived by graduates and the needs of business environment. The modern world should focus on the formation of graduates’ competencies in accordance with the demands of employers, which will pro-vide greater access to practical skills for students throughout the entire period of university studies. The purpose of the article is the differentiation of employers, analysis of their needs for graduates of economic specialties, readiness for partnership with HEIs. A survey of experts among employers and HEI professors allowed us to reveal the advantages of their social and professional partnerships and possible problems hampering the process of forming partnership relations. Discriminant analysis became the basis for classifying employers by the degree of their readiness to cooperate with HEIs. Three groups were employers are singled out: “business-focused”, “optimists” and “flagships”. Analysis of employers, taking into account their readiness to form partnership relations with HEIs, will contrib-ute to improving the quality of training personnel in business structures and HEIs.

DL), which has resulted in an unprecedented experiment in the sphere of higher education in Ukraine that requires scientific analysis. The aim of the work was to identify the possible potential directions of DL development in institutions of higher education as a result of marketing research of satisfaction/dissatisfaction of students with DL. The survey method was used in the study. The results of marketing research (an online survey of students) (Kharkiv, 2020, n = 316) allowed the authors to identify the factors of satisfaction and dissatisfaction of students with DL. Students considered the most important factors of satisfaction with DL as follows: development of competencies, self-organization, discipline, self-motivation, responsibility, taking an active position as participants of the educational process, comfort. Students expect that lectures secure improvement of teacher-student communication process; flexibility of educational approaches; use of interactive tools and constant change of activities to maintain the attention, interest, concentration of students on studying process. The latter will maximize students’ involvement in activities during training; improvement of digital competencies. The students` expectations are: flexibility of the DL platforms compared to full-time in-person education; creation of the “map” of the educational process in a distance mode. It is noted that the results of marketing research (the online survey) demonstrated the factors of satisfaction and dissatisfaction of students with DL. This information was considered as the arguments for identifying the possible potential directions of DL development in higher education institutions.