Career Festival at VDNH: How an Event About Work Became a Platform for Professional Restart

The Career Festival at VDNH this year goes far beyond a regular job fair. Its program shows that the issue of work in Ukraine is no longer limited only to finding an open position. For many people, it is about choosing a new direction, the need for reskilling, the first attempt to enter the labor market, returning after a break, or looking for more stable professional ground. Time for Action examined why this event matters not only for those who are currently looking for a job, but also for a wider conversation about education, skills, adaptation, and the future of the Ukrainian labor market.

The Career Festival is positioned as the largest career event in Ukraine. It brings together more than 200 employer companies, educational institutions, public organizations, and representatives of the state sector. In separate announcements about the program, the number already reaches more than 250 companies, educational and charitable organizations, and state institutions. This shows strong interest in a format where employers, educators, consultants, and people with different professional experience meet in one space. The main feature of the festival is its openness to different audiences. The event is designed not only for students or young specialists. It can be useful for school students who are only thinking about their future profession, for people who want to change fields, for those who do not receive responses to their resumes, for candidates after a career break, for veterans, women entering technical or production professions, and also for those looking for themselves in the cultural or creative industry. This is an important shift. Earlier, career events were often perceived as places where companies set up stands, hand out brochures, and collect candidate contacts. Here, the format is much broader. The program includes career guidance, career consultations, workshops, lectures, master classes, meetings with employers, educational activities, vacancies, and internships. This means a person can come not only with a ready resume, but also with the question: “Where should I move next?” The theme of the second festival “Online versus offline” accurately reflects the reality in which Ukrainians are working now. After the rapid spread of remote work, learning through digital platforms, relocation, changing schedules, and instability, people no longer choose between two separate worlds. Online gives access to wider opportunities, but offline remains important for live communication, trust, teamwork, and professional connections. That is why the conversation about balance between these formats has practical value.

Special attention should be paid to the “Career Café”. This is a new format where visitors can receive a free consultation from career advisers, take a career guidance test, and participate in master classes. This approach lowers the barrier for people who do not know where to start. Not everyone is ready to speak to an employer right away, but many find it easier to first review a resume, understand their strengths, or check whether the chosen field matches real expectations. The program includes many events related to resumes, LinkedIn, interviews, and self-presentation. This shows one of the main problems job seekers face: often people have experience, but do not know how to present it properly. Workshops on LinkedIn, typical CV mistakes, motivation letters, salary negotiations, and answers to difficult recruiter questions offer not theory for the sake of theory, but specific tools. For a labor market where competition combines with staff shortages in different industries, such preparation has real value.

An important part of the program concerns professional self-determination. Career guidance games for teenagers, lectures on choosing a profession at 16 and 35, conversations about calling, adaptation at a new job, and psychological aspects of professional choice show that a career is no longer perceived as one decision for an entire life. A person can change direction, study again, enter new fields, and reconsider their own decisions without feeling defeated.

A strong element of the festival is also attention to veterans. The discussion about educational and grant opportunities after service addresses one of the most important issues for Ukraine. Returning to civilian professional life requires not general promises, but clear routes how to get a new profession, how to launch a business, how to use military experience in a new stage of life. The presence of such topics in the program makes the festival not only a career event, but also a socially significant one. The topic of women in technical and production professions also stands out separately. The panel discussion by the State Employment Service about the program “Women in Male Professions” raises an issue that is becoming increasingly relevant for the Ukrainian labor market. Due to changing economic conditions, employer needs, and the transformation of employment, women are gaining more opportunities in fields that were previously often considered closed or difficult to access. It is important that this topic is presented through employer experience and real stories of women who have already mastered new professions. The participation of the Ukrainian Red Cross with the Face2Face project adds another dimension to the festival. This is an example of how a career event can show work in the humanitarian sector. The project offers people work connected with communication, negotiations, and motivating others to support humanitarian initiatives. Among the listed conditions are competitive hourly pay, a flexible schedule, the opportunity to exchange experience with foreign colleagues, and work in the largest humanitarian organization in the country. For those who want to combine income with socially useful activity, this can become a separate professional direction. The festival also opens space for creative professions. The program includes events about the acting profession, work in cinema, a career in show business, and cultural teams. This matters because creative industries often seem closed to people without previous experience or specialized education. A conversation with practitioners makes it possible to see not only the external side of the profession, but also real processes teamwork, requirements, risks, entry points, and prospects.

Overall, the Career Festival at VDNH demonstrates that a career in modern Ukraine is becoming a matter of flexibility, learning, and readiness to change. People need not only vacancies, but also explanations of how to prepare for a new stage, how to talk about their own experience, how not to fear a break in employment, how to choose education, how to enter a new field, and how not to lose themselves among a large number of options. That is why this event matters not only as a busy program at VDNH. It shows that the labor market is gradually moving from formal staff selection to a more complex model, where education, psychological readiness, self-presentation, reskilling, support for different groups of people, and a direct conversation about real opportunities become important. For Ukraine, which lives in conditions of constant change, such a format can be not a one-time event, but a necessary tool for professional recovery and development.