Scientific Staff Career Regulation: Foreign Experience

The article analyses the mechanisms of enhancing activity of horizontal and vertical rotation of scientific staff. It highlights the fact that the set of job positions in the Russian universities and research institutes is extremely narrow, which leads to demotivation of the researchers and their qualification stagnation. This fact contradicts the generally accepted international practice, when, as a rule, in addition to job positions a three-level rank system is actively used. With this system, a researcher can gradually increase his or her academic status and earnings within each position. Such a system is used in Australia, Israel, Italy, Norway, Malaysia, Niger, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, China and other countries. The article proposes to consider this experience and to introduce the more extensive system of job ranks with increasing wage rates into the Russian practice, which will allow to intensify the vertical rotation of scientific staff. In addition, the work touches on a problem of inbreeding, which in Russia has the most explicit forms and massive scale. The article considers professional biography of the leading American economist Martin Weitzman as an exemplary academic career. Based on this example of the academic career, the author offers anti-inbreeding measures that are used now in many countries of the world. In addition, the paper presents a set of specific anti-inbreeding measures that could be successfully adapted to the Russian system of personnel recruitment in the universities and research institutes and activate the horizontal rotation of professionals. It shows that the improvement of the current system of scientific staff career regulation in Russia can be achieved through adoption of normative documents regulating the considered mechanisms.