Before becoming a government-funded USSR-wide system for school graduates who didn't intend to receive a university degree, professional technical schools, a type of vocational education facility established in the former Soviet Union to train qualified industrial workers and servicemen, started out as vocational schools.
A professional technical school (Russian: - )  "professionalno-tehnicheskoye uchilishche" (acronym: PTU; , --) is a type of vocational education facility established in the former Soviet Union to train qualified industrial workers and servicemen. PTUs, increasingly standardized through the 1960s, formed a government-funded USSR-wide system for school graduates who didn't intend to receive a university degree. In 1940, they were reorganized to "vocational schools" (Russian:" "  "Remeslennoye uchilishche"), and in 1959 to PTUs. 
