Representatives of a large furniture business declare an acute shortage of specialists and call for popularizing the furniture maker profession.

Business and teachers jointly conduct a series of free quests, master classes and excursions to familiarize students with their profession. Kiev. February 22. UNIAN. Representatives of a large furniture business together with specialized educational institutions declare an acute shortage of specialists and an outflow of personnel abroad, and also call for solving the problem by popularizing the furniture maker profession. This was discussed at a press conference in UNIAN.

In particular, the commercial director of the furniture company MERX Elena Listopad said: “We have more than 300 people working in production, given the managers and other office workers. We constantly need personnel. Now there is no such a large turnover, 10 years ago, due to the fact that a wage system was developed depending on the number of products produced. ” According to her, in the situation on the labor market there is a tendency when a part of personnel goes to work in Poland, some of them come back. “Today, for the furniture industry, designers are most needed, these are people who create drawings for the future product, they have a salary depending on professional skills from 13 to 30 000 hryvnias,” she stressed.

Elena Listopad emphasized that the company is ready to train young professionals from scratch. For example, it takes a year to complete a job as a painter until the maximum wage is reached, and it takes less than a year to train a grinder. In this case, the salary of such specialists ranges from 10 to 20,000 hryvnia.

As Elena Pinchevska, head of the Department of Technology and Design of Wood Products at the National University of Bioresources and Nature Management of Ukraine, noted in her speech at a press conference, there is currently an acute shortage of applicants for furniture specialties due to insufficient information about the benefits of the profession. “Now there is a paradox: the industry needs workers, and after 3-4 years they will not be, because there are no applicants. Furniture manufacturers are asking us to provide workers all the time, ”she said. According to the professor, many simply do not know that the bachelor and masters of such programs are not layout designers, but designers and designers who use IT technologies in their activities and are participants in intellectual work.

In turn, the co-owner of MEBELOK LLC, a member of the Ukrainian Association of Furniture Manufacturers, Oksana Donskaya, said that in order to solve the shortage of specialists, the association organizes master classes, quests and excursions for schoolchildren. “Many, coming on a tour, they think that furniture production is noise, dirt, and there is nothing to do there. And when they come in, they see computers, silence and a person who works with his head, and not with his hands, they fall in love with this profession, ”she said. According to Donskoy, it is very important to popularize woodworking specialties among young people, since the furniture industry is export-oriented, and for 2018 the country sent furniture for 629 million dollars abroad, and imported twice less. “Today the salaries in our industry are at European level. We have to pay, because there is an outflow of personnel, and on the other hand, we have resources, because we send for export, ”she said. Representatives of the association reported that they wrote an appeal to the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine with a request to distribute information about the possibility of free excursions by schools.

The press conference was attended by: Elena Pinchevska, head of the department of technology and design of wood products at the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, doctor of technical sciences, professor Victoria Derevlyuk, deputy director for educational and industrial work of the CPU No. 25; Oksana Donskoy, co-owner of MEBELOK LLC, the head of the UAFM Training Platform; Maxim Shestopalov, owner of the Comfort Zone production company; Elena Listopad, commercial director of the furniture company MERX; Dmitry Orel, commercial manager of Europroject Ukraine LLC. UNIAN certificate.

The Ukrainian Association of Furniture Manufacturers is an industry union operating in Ukraine for 17 years. Ukrainian furniture makers provide about 50 thousand workplaces to more than 5,000 enterprises. Ukrainian furniture is exported to 90 countries of the world. According to the association, furniture production in 2018 grew by 18.7%.

Read more on UNIAN: https://press.unian.ua/…/10456974-predstavniki-velikogo-meb…