Startup Project at INRTU Aims to Digitize Continuing Professional Education
Irkutsk National Research Technical University (INRTU) has held final thesis defenses for students in its Information Systems and Technologies program.
One of the master's students, Anastasia Loskutnikova, defended her thesis as a startup project. She presented the concept for a digital platform designed to organize and manage continuing professional education (including professional retraining and advanced training) programs at the university. The proposed solution is expected to eliminate bureaucratic bottlenecks while making document processing and access to professional retraining and advanced training programs faster and more efficient.
The Platform Will Handle Routine Administrative Work
Anastasia Loskutnikova's project is designed to digitize the administrative processes behind continuing professional education, including student enrollment, program administration, graduation procedures, certificate issuance, and reporting. The startup project, titled Development of a Concept for a Digital Platform to Organize and Deliver Continuing Professional Education Programs at a University, was supervised by Alexey Govorkov, Director of the E.A. Popov Institute of Information Technologies and Data Analysis.
According to Loskutnikova, the number of people enrolled in continuing professional education programs in Russia has increased by 28% over the past five years, reaching 8.5 million. She explained that the goal of her work was to develop a concept for a university digital platform supporting CPE programs. The platform is expected to reduce the manual workload of program managers by at least 30% to 40%.
The Project Is Expected to Pay for Itself Within Three Years
Two continuing professional education projects - IT Academy and AI START - were selected for the study because they operate under different conditions and organizational models. The research showed that administrators of CPE programs face challenges throughout the entire process, from planning and participant enrollment to certificate issuance and final reporting.
During her research, Anastasia Loskutnikova identified the main weaknesses of manually managing continuing professional education programs. She defined the platform's functional and non-functional requirements, designed interfaces for both administrators and participants, and outlined the expected benefits of the IT solution along with a phased implementation roadmap. She ultimately proposed an online business process model covering participant enrollment, program administration, reporting, graduation procedures, and certificate issuance.
An important part of the project involved an economic assessment comparing two implementation options: a minimum viable product and an expanded version. According to the author's calculations, the platform should pay for itself within one to three years. Once deployed, it is expected to reduce routine operations by up to 60%, while document processing time could fall to as little as one minute.
Loskutnikova also validated her central hypothesis that developing a digital platform concept for continuing professional education would reduce manual administrative work by at least 30% to 40% through a unified data registry, automated document workflows, and automated status tracking.
Making Professional Retraining Easier to Access
In the long term, Loskutnikova's project is expected to simplify access to professional retraining and advanced training programs while accelerating document processing for learners. At the national level, projects like this contribute to the digital transformation of education and help prepare the workforce the economy needs, particularly as demand for continuous professional retraining continues to grow. The platform could eventually find broad adoption across Russian universities and corporate learning centers. Notably, the customer and external reviewer for the master's project was En+ Digital, the IT subsidiary of the En+ energy and metals group, giving the project a realistic path toward becoming a pilot solution for university or corporate education environments.
Looking ahead, IT products of this kind could see broad adoption across Russia, particularly if they are integrated with educational management systems, electronic document workflows, and government digital platforms.
