Join IT: leading companies have formed key requirements for Juniors

The demand for building a career in IT among young people grows year by year. The industry offers a relatively high salary level for rookies – according to a recent study by DOU, the average salary of a Junior-tester is $ 400, Junior-developer – $550. The experts from the IT Ukraine’s member-companies say, that a list of standardized requirements will help young professionals to prepare for work on commercial projects, so companies won’t spend a few months on their training. To start working with IT, a Junior Software Developer must have average HTML/CSS coding skills and an initial level of JavaScript and .NET knowledge. Instead, code quality and error tracking are not a priority, as they improve in the process. In addition to technical knowledge, industry representatives have identified initial social skills, such as basic level of stress tolerance, experience, teamwork ability and time management. Also, it is impossible to develop in IT without knowledge of English, but for newbie-engineers it is enough to speak the language at level B1, which is average. This will be enough for a work with technical documentation and correspondence with foreign clients. By now, the community has prepared a unified list of requirements and recommendations for popular starting careers in IT-sphere – Manual Testing, Front-end and .NET-development. Materials are available to download. To get acquainted with the full list of recommendations of Ukrainian IT-business you can follow the link below. Creating a list of requirements for these specialties is not accidental – these knowledge and skills are considered to be the departure point for starting work in the IT-industry and further development of a specialist. In addition, as the experts of companies point out, the mastery of all the above skills and knowledge does not require additional higher education, and most of them can be acquired independently.

With the adoption of the law “On Higher Education” in 2014, higher education institutions autonomously formulate and implement the content of educational programs. At present, much work has been done to develop new standards of higher education based on a competent approach. We will be glad if IT industry representatives will be able to participate more actively in their final training and are ready to contribute to the development of industry standards. The process also depends on the motivation of local teachers, their will to implement changes that require real support from businesses

Oleg Sharov, Director of the Department of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine

In 2017 the Ukrainian IT-industry grew by 20% and currently has about 120,000 specialists. In order to keep such growth rates, this year it needs to get about 25-30 thousand of new specialists, while Ukrainian universities annually produce only 12-16 thousand students of IT-specialties. Work on improving the quantitative and qualitative indicators of Ukrainian IT-education is one of the key areas of the IT Ukraine’s activity.

All the wealth of the IT-industry is in heads of high tech specialists. That is why the development of human capital is a priority for the IT Ukraine Association. Today, IT-companies act as an intermediary between the global IT-market and Ukrainian universities, helping educational institutions to modernize their programs, and students to receive relevant knowledge. After presenting a single list of requirements for junior specialists, we will continue to conduct a dialogue with representatives of Ukrainian universities on how to jointly implement the proposed recommendations in the educational process in the near future.

Ihor Beda, Pesident of the IT Ukraine Association, GlobalLogic Ukraine