On request from the Komsomolsk-on-Amur Forest Industry Technical School, the FLEG II Program held a training seminar for its teaching staff.

FLEG II Regional Consultant informed the audience about the results and outputs of the program, including the two textbooks it published: Improving Forest Law Enforcement and Governance in the Russian Federation (2015) and Law Enforcement and Governance in Forest Use, Protection and Renewal (2015).

The Komsomolsk-on-Amur Forest Industry College is the only vocational school in this field in the Khabarovsk Kray which trains skilled workers and mid-level specialists for the forest sector. It offers a training program that focuses on forest logging technology. Graduates from this program are in great demand among employers from timber industries where they can work as forest logging foremen and as forest rangers.

However, a critical issue for both college graduates and program trainers is the low level of applied knowledge. Unfortunately, available training guidelines, manuals and textbooks and, as a consequence, graduate knowledge have become outdated and fail to reflect the current needs and standards for modern forest logging and forest management practices. The college administration and teaching staff are aware of the problem and keep on looking for new information sources, including new training manuals and textbooks to bridge this gap. Ms. Svetlana Pleshkova, Deputy Director for Training and Operation, has become keen to cooperate with the FLEG II Program as its training manuals/textbooks could be used under the program of training in forest logging technology.

The college teachers were briefly informed about the FLEG II results and outputs. They listened with great interest, and were also provided with detailed information about the structure and contents of the textbooks. The seminar participants unanimously concluded that the strengths of the textbooks consisted in their module-based structure, information-intensive contents and reflection of the most relevant to-date issues of forest logging and forest management operations. They were particularly impressed with the tests in the textbooks as well as scenarios for business games, related to selected practical facets of forest management operations.

The college administration and faculty found the human resource capacity building contribution of FLEG II highly praiseworthy, and assured that the published textbooks would be necessarily used for training. They also got interfered in an upcoming publication – a manual for teachers of school-based forest management units titled Forest and Man – Practical Training in the Forest.