Assessing the ability of Ukrainian higher education to offer key skills of tomorrow

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Ukraine must search for efficient tools to accelerate the economic recovery in the post-war period. The workforce equipped with future skills is globally considered to be able to accelerate the pace of innovative growth and achieve the goals of Industry 4.0. This study aims to identify key skills of tomorrow and outline the ways in which these skills can be strengthened at Ukrainian universities. The skills of tomorrow that the Ukrainian standard for higher education recommends the universities include in the existing and new educational programs in various specialties were divided into five groups depending on their nature. Moreover, they were mapped following sustainable development goals to comprehensively assess their ability to promote each goal. Thus, the concept of a ‘future skill’ has been defined to contain aspects such as sustainability, skills, Industry 4.0, energy, education, energy efficiency, productivity, and creativity. The relationships between each future skill and its ability to facilitate sustainable development goals were described, and possible problematic areas were identified. Finally, the paper revealed that the skills able to boost the economy, which is specifically relevant for the post-war recovery of Ukraine, are not satisfactorily represented in Ukrainian higher education. Therefore, to make the Ukrainian higher education system a decisive factor in post-war recovery, it should shift the focus from solely hard skills to the skills of the future.

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    • Figure 1. Word cloud with the keywords found in the literature
    • Figure 2. Distribution of scientific papers indexed in Scopus among leading Ukrainian universities according to sustainable development goals, % published papers
    • Table 1. Key skills needed to achieve sustainable development goals
    • Table 2. Summary of the objectives formulated by Ukrainian higher education standards for bachelor educational level related to the key skills of tomorrow
    • Conceptualization
      Oksana Zakharova
    • Formal Analysis
      Oksana Zakharova, Liudmyla Usyk
    • Methodology
      Oksana Zakharova
    • Supervision
      Oksana Zakharova
    • Writing – original draft
      Oksana Zakharova, Liudmyla Usyk
    • Resources
      Liudmyla Usyk
    • Validation
      Liudmyla Usyk
    • Writing – review & editing
      Liudmyla Usyk, Maryna Petchenko
    • Data curation
      Maryna Petchenko
    • Funding acquisition
      Maryna Petchenko
    • Investigation
      Maryna Petchenko
    • Project administration
      Maryna Petchenko
    • Software
      Maryna Petchenko
    • Visualization
      Maryna Petchenko