The comparative analysis of challenges to the national education systems in Bulgaria and Ukraine (on the example of the tourism and IT sectors)

Abstract

The article offers an overview of the global trends in education that have emerged during the 2020 economic recession; provides a retrospective analysis of the change in economic formations during the 1990s, which still influences the business environment and national education systems in post-socialist countries; analyses the structure of tourism flows in Bulgaria and Ukraine in the recent pre-crisis period; distinguishes the changes between local tourism markets in both countries and consequent demands to HEIs, training the workforce for domestic and international companies; outlines the IT services market in Bulgaria and Ukraine from the side of employment generating; points out the discrepancy between the requests to developers of IT solutions at the local level and the orders of transboundary corporations, which are the largest employers today for the economies in transition; presents the grouping of national economies by innovation performance according to the Global Innovation Index report; classifies non-material industries on the basis of potential for increasing added value and duplicating the product; indicates the restrictions of recreational capacity for the tourism infrastructure; highlights the disparity in clustering the world countries by absolute and relative Travel & Tourism impact to GDP; substantiates the need for interdisciplinary approach in composing the curricula for specialities of the related industries; emphasises the existence of thresholds in the process of increasing the professional competence level. The relevance is grounded by the ultimate changes within the current structure of the global economy, as the sphere of higher education is quite significant in the international trade in services; the general paradigm of the theory of international economic relations is being modified now towards the refusal from the resources’ inexhaustibility postulate; thus the research novelty consists in the implementation of supporting programmes and strategies in the field of higher education under the consideration of these trends.