Oksana Zakharova

One of the most effective instruments for stabilizing Ukrainian national economy might become increasing the level of competitiveness and profitability of enterprises’ industrial and economic activities, especially in the industrial sector. To demonstrate a positive change, it is advisable to create conditions that could facilitate implementing advanced technologies for rational use of all types of resources at the level of an enterprise, with staff being the key resource. That is why tendencies of accumulating human capital and the prospects of its strategic development will depend on the degree of efficiency with which management organizes work on the implementation of staff formation procedures. At the same time, the effectiveness of personnel formation processes is influenced by a significant number of factors, which may be external and internal by nature, which perform transformational impact on all spheres of the enterprise’s activity, and which may bring both positive and negative consequences. At the same time, companies do not always have at their disposal effective tools for adjusting the consequences, and even less often do they have instruments to cope with these effects so as to benefit from them. Therefore, efficiency and promptness of managerial decisions on preventing negative consequences and increasing the positive impact will depend on the degree of thoroughness and aptness with which the indicated factors can be established, which would further facilitate objectivity, rationality and practical feasibility of the strategy adopted by the enterprise.

Due to russian military aggression in Ukraine, two waves of relocating educational institutions from occupied and dangerous territories have occurred over the past nine years (in 2014 and 2022). In the first place, relocation affected those universities that were based in industrial regions before the war and trained professional personnel for large industrial enterprises. The speed of the country’s post-war recovery will depend on the availability of professional specialists able to restore industrial enterprises’ functioning. Therefore, it is necessary to highlight the changes in the human capital of displaced universities due to relocation. The aim of this study is to assess the losses of human capital the displaced universities suffered due to russian military aggression. Using the example of Donetsk National Technical University, which has been relocated twice, the study illustrates the stages in which the organizational structure of one of the university’s divisions changed and the number of teachers decreased in 2014–2023. The study describes the key features of the first and second displacement waves and their implementation specifics. The survey of the resigned teachers demonstrated the losses of human capital experienced by the university over nine years. The benefits for those Ukrainian universities which have hired displaced teachers are exemplified. The results of this study indicate that the experience of displaced universities should be scrutinized at the ministerial level and used to develop strategies for restoring the human capital of the displaced universities and further accumulating human capital in Ukrainian higher education.

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.