BNTU, Minsk, 17 December. Education system must clearly respond to the labor market needs for engineering personnel. This was stated to journalists by the Minister of Education Andrei Ivanets following a meeting at the Belarusian National Technical University on the quality of training of engineering personnel, held with the participation of the Prime Minister of Belarus Roman Golovchenko.

"We must very clearly respond to the labor market needs for engineering personnel. We see a certain imbalance. In areas such as information technology, we are training twice as many specialists as are in demand in the economy. This largely speaks of inertia: we needed exactly these specialists, but after 4-5 years have passed and we see that every engineer must actually be an IT specialist, but in his own applied area, while in areas such as industry, agriculture, forestry, we are training 1.5-2 times fewer specialists than are in demand in these industries," said Andrei Ivanets.

According to him, in this regard, very serious work is needed jointly with the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection, so that the long-term forecast for personnel for 4-5 years be sufficiently reliable and meet the needs of the economy during the period of graduation of specialists from universities.

A material and technical base is also needed to train engineering personnel. As the Minister said, this year the creation of two competence centers on the basis of the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics for training personnel for microelectronics, radiophysics and information technology is being completed. The creation of a competence center at the Brest State Technical University for automated robotic complexes is also being completed. "In the next academic year, we have plans to create three competence centers: for digital mechanical engineering at the Belarusian National Technical University, for new materials at the Gomel State Technical University, for the food industry at the Belarusian State University of Food and Chemical Technologies. The creation of such competence centers is nothing more than a symbiosis of education, science and innovation. We will be able not only to qualitatively train future engineers, but also to carry out scientific research as part of the preparation of master's, candidate's and doctoral dissertations. And most importantly, we will be able to test technologies as test, prototype-industrial samples for subsequent implementation in the real sector of the economy," Andrei Ivanets shared his plans.