The Government of Ukraine provides a number of tools and incentives to facilitate the successful economic integration of veterans. This was stated by Yuliia Svyrydenko, First Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine - Minister of Economy, in her speech at the Open Dialogues organized by work.ua, which focused on the issues of barrier-free access to employment for veterans.

“Veterans are a huge economic force. Our task as a state is to provide them with opportunities for successful economic integration. For businesses, hiring our heroes is an additional opportunity. After all, people who have been through the war have extremely valuable qualities and experience: they are skilled, resilient, enduring, purposeful, and know what true partnership and teamwork are. Therefore, they are capable of strengthening teams,” Yuliia Svyrydenko said.

According to her, the Government has introduced a number of programmes to ensure that people who want to work have the opportunity to do so.

In particular, these are grant programmes for starting and developing a business for those who want to be entrepreneurs. Veterans and their spouses may receive support from the state to develop their own business in the form of a grant of up to UAH 1 million. And at the same time, they can provide jobs for their fellow veterans, as a prerequisite for the grant is the creation of 1-2 jobs. They can also receive a grant of up to UAH 8 million if they want to develop a business in the processing sector.

For those who are more interested in studying or changing their profession, there are opportunities to acquire a new specialty that is more in demand in the labour market or to improve their professional level. This can be done at 8 vocational education centres of the State Employment Service. Veterans can be trained in 400 educational programmes for advanced training and 95 working professions. The most popular among them are training as a driver, tractor driver, UAV operator, entrepreneurship and business planning programmes, and social and psychological assistance, including for veterans and people with war-related disabilities.

Another way to get the profession you want is to take a voucher for training in the amount of UAH 30,000. The voucher offers 124 professions and specialties, ranging from IT to agriculture. A person chooses an educational institution among those accredited by the Ministry of Education and a study programme.

According to First Deputy Prime Minister, one of the problems today is structural unemployment - when the qualifications, knowledge and experience of people available in the labour market do not meet the needs of employers. It can be solved by training and retraining people for professions and specialties that are more in demand in the labour market.

In addition, the Government is ready to reimburse employers who hire people with disabilities for the costs of equipping their workplace. This includes the cost of purchasing special furniture, devices, and equipment that such a person needs to make their workplace comfortable and safe. The amount of compensation is up to UAH 106,000.