Challenges in human capital development in Russia in the age of knowledge-based economy

The article discovers and analyses principal challenges facing an optimal functioning of human capital in Russia and the societal acceptance for these challenges and their reshaping into key strategic aims. The author applies the empiric logically rational problem structuring technique that consists of 12 prognostic stages. The fertility crisis has raised a formidable social challenge that could resolve into either a favourable or unfavourable scenario depending on a certain society and its human capital. The favourable scenario assumes developing a demography management system. However, most countries including Russia fail to accept this challenge in full. A relatively slow initial depopulation pace in Russia—2 percent over 30 years since 1993—is one of the reasons why this social challenge has not been adopted yet. Another challenge facing human capital development relates to the education system and lies in the fact that Russia has encountered a barrier in the proportion of population who get a tertiary education (higher and secondary vocational). Due to this fact large developed countries have approached Russia as to this parameter that is 57 percent. The reasons behind the educational barrier include uncertainty about educational paradigm (related to science or profession) and ambiguous strategic aims in education (priority to availability at the sake of quality and ambiguous expectations of various key consumers). Access to knowledge affects significantly performance efficiency of human capital and this raises, in Russia, a challenge of access of HC to a sufficient amount of knowledge. This challenge is shaped by cross-country barriers and shortages in the information flow system in Russia itself. National projects of Russia such as «Demography», «Health care» and «Education» are aimed to adopt the challenges facing human capital development and this indicates that society starts understanding the significance of these challenges.