Educational activities20 January 2025р.Representatives of the Scientific School of Socioeconomics and Human Resources Management continue the tradition of holding educational events, among which scientific seminars have taken key positions. Thus, on January 16, 2025, a scientific seminar on “Higher Education and the Social and Labor Sphere in the Coordinates of the New Economy: Imperatives of Interaction and Development” was held by Doctor of Economics, Professor A.M. Kolot. The purpose of the scientific seminar was to discuss the concept of co-evolution of higher education and the social and labor sphere in the coordinates of the new socio-economic reality, which should contribute to the realization and overcoming of existing worldview limitations, revision of stale mental schemes regarding the interconnection, mutually conditioned development of these institutions of the new economy, for an adequate response of politicians, social partners, and other civil society institutions to the challenges and threats in the field of sustainable human development. The hypotheses defined by the author of the report were tested and confirmed in the course of the study conducted by A.M. Kolot are as follows: 1. Achievement of a socially acceptable level of social quality largely depends on the ability of leading institutions, such as higher education and the social and labor sphere, to respond to modern challenges. 2. The existing unsystematic, largely fragmented, semi-autonomous consideration of the problems of higher education and social and labor sphere development is unproductive and hinders the solution of urgent tasks of ensuring sustainable development of the leading institutions of the new economy and network society. Instead, the interdisciplinary practice of research, mastering the modern philosophy of interconnections, interactions and mutually conditioned development of higher education and the social and labor sphere opens a window of new opportunities for humanly measurable, sustainable social progress. The assumptions that the nature of the new economy and its leading institutions is associated exclusively or mainly with the concentration of knowledge (the emergence of the knowledge economy) and the concentration of digital information innovations (the emergence of the information economy) need to be clarified. According to the speaker, there are other significant circumstances, characteristics, and dominants of the development of the new economy, the awareness of the nature of which is of fundamental importance for understanding the vectors of development of both higher education and the social and labor sphere. Today, there are significant institutional gaps between higher education and the social and labor sphere, the philosophy of which is not realized and not properly explained. There are insufficient arguments for the conclusion that higher education should be oriented to the current needs of the labor market. A part of the new normal is the situation when more and more representatives of Generation Z, the digital generation, are using the platforms of both higher education and the social and labor sphere. This necessitates taking into account their personal characteristics, motivational attitudes, value orientations, etc. to shape educational and social and labor policies. At the present stage, the development of higher education is based on strategies, programs, and policies that do not take into account both obvious and especially latent phenomena and processes that are already determining, and will further determine, the future horizons and the future format of the development of the social and labor sphere. The theoretical and methodological substantiation of the paradigm of interconnection, interdependence, interaction of higher education institutions with other institutions of the social and labor sphere and, above all, the Labor 4.0 platform needs to be updated. The presented results of the study convincingly demonstrate that higher education and the social and labor sphere are extremely close in nature and mission, impact on human life, and causes of transformation processes, and therefore further semi-isolated, semi-autonomous consideration, analysis, and interpretation of the progress of these leading institutions should be considered unproductive and making it impossible to ensure sustainable human-dimensional development of the new economy and network society. There is an urgent need to move the scientific discourse that reveals the nature, dialectic, synergy of interconnections, and interaction of the institutions that have become the objects of this study to the epicenter of further scientific and applied research.   |