BOOSTSCIENCE - Boosting Education Quality and Entrepreneurial Mindsets for Natural Sciences in Ukraine

The conflict in Ukraine has led to a loss of over a quarter of Ukrainian workforce. This creates an urgent need for skilled labour force, also among the youth, as businesses are turning to younger workers to mitigate labour shortages, underscores the need for modernised educational programs to prepare youth for immediate entry into the workforce, and emphasises the need for stronger ties between universities and industries. Strengthening Higher Education in Ukraine can therefore be the fastest way to postwar recovery, ensuring that the country doesn’t fall short in highly skilled workforce. However, HEIs in Ukraine face many challenges (transition to remote learning, difficult collaboration with the private sector, resource constraints) to ensure resilience and human capital development. The only way forward is to modify academic programs and teaching methods to align with the current reality. Among other sectors, Science, Technology & Innovation (ST&I) holds great promise as an engine of economic growth and future innovation; Natural Sciences, and especially the Biology and Chemistry disciplines, are at the forefront of ST&I fields, and Ukrainian HEIs must adopt new strategies and training programs (high quality and accessible digital environments) to provide to their graduates up-to-date and go-to-market ST&I skills. BOOSTSCIENCE will meet this need, providing an innovative, interdisciplinary master-level module which will be a robust digital framework where Biology & Chemistry students can be theoretically and practically trained in modern applied topics in their sectors. The module will train the students in current labour market demands in soft skills (market analysis, entrepreneurial activities), together with hard skills (chemical & biomolecular analysis, environmental analysis, drug/food quality control etc); importantly, the training will be done through a virtual learning environment, with cutting-edge educational tools enhancing long-distance training.