The IT sphere is what we are proud of! This is the area that is successfully developing in our country. “Greenhouse” conditions are created for it, and, on the plus side, we are one of the leading countries in the world! Information technologies became one of the vectors of Ukraine’s development for the next decade. Therefore, IT education, as we know, is one of the most popular among Ukrainian prospective university students.
However, is the market satisfied with the level of education, are there enough IT specialists graduated from Ukrainian universities? How are the needs and demands of this market changing?
The Center for Economic Recovery (the association of about 60 companies and 30 think tanks in Ukraine), together with the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine and the Ministry of Digital Information, decided to study this issue and conducted a rapid analysis of market needs.
Education employees, as well as more than 150 representatives of the IT industry, about a hundred profile experts and 33 business associations, IT clusters and companies were involved in enquiries and discussions. The results of the rapid audit were presented at a meeting of the task team on IT education reform.
According to market auditors, the IT sector in Ukraine has more than 200,000 specialists, which is the second place in Central and Eastern Europe. Over the last 4 years, the number of IT specialists in Ukraine has doubled. But no one suffers from unemployment, because the annual growth of the sector by about 20% results in the similar increase in demand for specialists.
We do not observe problems caused by possible ‘overproduction’ of IT specialists, and it seems that they will not arise any time soon! Given the current growth rate of needs and estimates of representative of this industry, by 2030 the sector will need at least 500-600 thousand IT professionals.
At the same time, there is a great shortage of required specialists in Ukraine, as IT specialists make up only 1.3% of all employees, which is 2.5 times less than in Poland and almost 5 times less than in Estonia. For our national industry, this is one of the disincentive factors for its growth.
However, every year Ukrainian higher education brings to the market about 25.2 thousand IT specialists, which is much more than in Poland (17 thousand), Romania (8 thousand) or Bulgaria (4 thousand). Where do they go?
It is analyzed that only about 7.5 applicants reacted to each of the open vacancies in IT technologies in 2018-2019, which is considered to be a very low figure. At the same time, Ukraine annually loses 3-4% of its IT specialists who are looking for better bread abroad. And the number of IT specialists who come to work in our country is quite small. Thus, the first conclusion: the pace of IT specialists training in Ukraine does not meet market demand and hinders the development of the IT sector itself.
And what about the quality of training? It turns out that it does not meet market requirements, and educational programs do not cover new and promising technologies.
The rapid growth in the number of specialists entails significant imbalances in experience and skills. 38% of Ukrainian IT specialists have minimal experience and are at a lower level of readiness to perform complex tasks. And only 14% are able to work at a high level.
And the Ukrainian IT sector structure differs significantly from the structure, for example, in Poland, where the share of experienced professionals is more than three times higher than in Ukraine. And the share of the least experienced is 4.75 times less than in Ukraine.
According to the Global Competitiveness index, the quality of human capital in Ukraine is at a fairly high level (39th place) and is quite comparable with other leaders of the subregion (Poland – 35th place). However, only a small number of specialists are able to work in the field of advanced technologies in our country. For example, only 4% of Ukrainian IT specialists are competent in the Big Data sphere, and 1.3% – in the technology of the Internet of Things.
Unfortunately, Ukrainian universities have almost no programs related to new promising IT technologies; specialization in Big Data processing is available in less than 10 universities, and working with artificial intelligence – only in 8 universities.
The results of the market analysis, generalized proposals and comments were presented at the meeting of the task team on IT education reform.
What problems need to be solved quickly? And is it possible to solve them quickly? After all, the problem is complex. And it begins with the secondary school, which often teaches mathematics at low quality. As a result, of 350,000 school graduates, 150,000 do not even register for the external independent testing in mathematics, and 70,000 of those who enrolled, failed this year. There is still a long way to go to find out causes of this situation. And is it known that only half of the graduates in IT specialties of Ukrainian universities do not work in these specialties? Obviously, such is the quality of their training.
There are really a lot of problems. IT education should be reformed: “from point-by-point adjustment of problematic issues to systemic transformation of IT education” – this was said at the meeting of the task team.
Olesia DIACHUK