The IT market in Kazakhstan today is developing at an unprecedented speed: according to the ICT giant IBA Group, the country needs 10,000 IT specialists annually. However, demand is not keeping pace with supply. Many employees work for two companies, and development centers are eager to attract re-locants who are ready to pay 1-3 million tenge. The abolition of “visarun” and the problem of obtaining a residence permit complicate the import of personnel, and in the meantime the country cannot fully cover the need with its own resources.
The need for IT specialists is growing along with the scale of the industry. The volume of services in the field of computer programming and consulting in 2023 exceeded a trillion tenge. Expectedly, the number of vacancies has also increased - by more than a third over the last year. More offers with a salary of more than 2 million tenge have appeared on the market. All this suggests that the IT market in Kazakhstan has been growing steadily over the past few years. But any growth requires resources.
There is a shortage of highly qualified personnel in the country. Companies often face problems in recruiting experienced specialists, and relocation is complicated by legalization issues. This can lead to unfinished projects, customer dissatisfaction and difficulties in retaining key employees in the country.
Zuhra Livitskaya, SAP project manager at the international IT company IBA Group, spoke about industry trends. For more than 13 years, she has been engaged in digital transformation of business. She has implemented dozens of successful projects for national and private companies in Kazakhstan. Her work includes not only implementing IT systems, building architecture, conducting business process engineering and automating internal systems, but also selecting teams for projects.
Entire companies are relocating to Kazakhstan
The active inflow of IT specialists to the country is the combined result of several factors at once: the geopolitical situation, active support of the IT industry by the government, the arrival of foreign technology companies, and an increase in the number of internal projects.
“The geopolitical situation has probably played the most important role in this issue. Over the past few years, we have seen a large number of relocated specialists from Russia, Belarus and Uzbekistan. Specialists come not only on their own, but also together with their employers who open offices in our country. The capitalization of the most famous businesses that have recently come to the market is about $30 billion. And this is without taking into account small companies, the number of which exceeds several hundred,” admits Zukhra Livitskaya.
The development of the domestic IT industry is positively affected by the work of the Astana Hub technopark, which provides tax benefits and other preferences. Today it has more than 1,500 residents, and their number is constantly growing. One of them is IBA Group, one of the largest developers in Eastern Europe.
Another factor is COVID-19. It was the pandemic that gave a significant impetus to the development of IT services all over the world, and Kazakhstan was no exception. The country rethought the role of online services and realized that many things can be done remotely. Companies began to actively develop and design IT products that are customized for online services.
The abolition of “visarun” and difficulties with residence permits complicate the development of the IT market
Attracting highly qualified specialists is half the battle. It is important to retain them and make the process of their legalization in the country simple and understandable. Unfortunately, there are difficulties in this direction.
At the beginning of last year Kazakhstan canceled the possibility of leaving the country for a short period of time to continue the visa-free regime. Thus, IT workers lost the opportunity to make a “visarun”, which allowed them to stay in the country and work further.
There are also difficulties in obtaining a residence permit for IT workers. It is not so easy to get it, even if they are specialists from neighboring countries. For example, there are examples when families of IT specialists live and work in Kazakhstan for more than 5 years and even have real estate. They regularly apply for residence permits, but they have never been approved.
All these limitations already affect the formation of project teams. One of the options is to mix teams of local IT specialists and foreigners, budgeting for regular business trips, flights and accommodation. In the end, this makes the project more expensive. It is difficult to do otherwise, since the implementation of complex IT systems requires the hired specialists to be constantly on the customer's premises, in his offices, and in production. For example, most large SAP system implementation projects require the team to be present at least 80% of the time.
“I will tell you an interesting case related to the confirmation of competencies. When submitting documents for a tender, we encountered a situation when we could not confirm the competencies of the project team due to differences in the system of approach to job titles in different countries. In the application, we specify the competencies: education, diploma, certificates of additional training, and information from employment records.
The problem is that even in the CIS countries there are different job classifiers, which results in the positions of the same specialist being specified in different ways. It came to the point where we ordered an expert examination which confirmed that the specialty in the diploma of another country was suitable for the customer's requirements,” says an expert from IBA Group.
Without attracting foreign personnel, many complex projects cannot be implemented in-house. For example, when implementing SAP Master Data Governance (a system of centralized management of business-critical data), IBA Group has to attract the expertise of colleagues from foreign offices. There are not so many specialists in this area in Kazakhstan, and almost always they are busy on other projects. The market is increasingly demanding this expertise. Attracting IT specialists from other countries has become an urgent necessity.
Every fifth IT worker in Kazakhstan is torn between two companies
The market in Kazakhstan has its own peculiarities that are not typical of other countries. For example, it is customary to create entire IT companies for the realization of one large project. The staff is assembled for it, and a team is formed. Therefore, when specialists are interviewed by foreign companies, frequent job changes raise questions among HR specialists.
Another trend is that our IT specialists are reluctant to work for one company. According to the research, in 2022 more than 21% of specialists had several jobs at once, while in 2021 there were 17.5% of such specialists, and in 2020 - only 8%. Now every fifth IT specialist in Kazakhstan works for several companies, according to IBA Group estimates.
“What is it connected with? During the total remote work during the pandemic, programmers realized that all work can be done remotely, and for this it is not necessary to cooperate with only one company. Therefore, many are looking for work on a contractual basis. This is profitable for the specialist, but carries huge risks for the company and the project,” comments an expert from IBA Group.
But it is more convenient for IT specialists: they can increase their earnings and work in parallel for several companies. The biggest risk in case of refusal of further cooperation is the loss of a month's pay.
For companies, out-of-staff specialists are a cat in a bag. A contractor's contract does not protect against the risks that this type of cooperation carries. It is much more difficult to influence a person than an employee on the payroll who works under a labor contract. And for a project manager this is a huge difficulty: he has a team of strong specialists who do not actually owe him anything. And if a person unexpectedly drops out of a project, it is almost impossible to replace them quickly without losing quality and deadlines.
“I have an interesting and at the same time funny case. One specialist was called to a meeting between the contractor and the customer, where he had to talk to himself and answer a number of questions about system support. It so happened that he concluded a contract for system maintenance, and with another company - for the finalization of functionality, as it turned out, for the same system,” shares Zukhra Livitskaya.
In Kazakhstan's IT community, many people know each other
Large projects to implement IT solutions usually require a team of 50 people or even more - you get somewhere around 5-6 people per direction.
“I'll tell you right away that finding 5 free consultants for one module is not just difficult - it's extra difficult. Since several projects are being implemented simultaneously in the country, the key specialists of the industry are scheduled for several years in advance. Therefore, we are forced to use personnel with high competence from neighboring countries. Often customers require employees with specific certificates to join the team, the holders of which are only a few people in our country,” shares a project manager from IBA Group.
For example, there was a case in the Kazakhstan market when a company recruited a team and then had to partially replace it. This situation is not unique, but it is not common. There was no “match” in the project: the team and the customer's specialists did not find a common language. If such a situation occurs, the customer has the right to change specialists. And we had to urgently find new people.
Another peculiarity when implementing projects in Kazakhstan is that practically everyone knows each other. And there are situations when a specialist refuses to work because of the composition of the team. This is fraught with the fact that you can lose valuable personnel because team members have had negative experiences of cooperation with each other in the past. There is another situation when specialists do not want to work for a particular company. There are cases when none of the local specialists want to work with a certain client, and as a result, a completely foreign team has to be hired.
The market will invest in training, but now we need experienced IT specialists
In the coming years, the number of projects will increase, including in Kazakhstan. A boom in artificial intelligence is coming. And this trend is already clearly felt.
“To remain technological and independent, we need to invest more in training our own staff and adopt best practices from visiting specialists. The country has large-scale plans to train IT specialists. IT companies are expected to develop a culture of internships and actively invest in personnel at the university training stage. This involves opening laboratories, holding hackathons, organizing internships, and lectures by practitioners. Yes, it is costly and difficult, but it will help to create a healthy environment, thanks to which beginners will be able to work in companies on real projects after their training. For the time being, there is an acute shortage of experienced senior and middle level IT specialists in the market, and now it should be closed, including by foreign specialists", - the representative of IBA Group is convinced.
The IT market in Kazakhstan will continue to grow in the near future. Companies are actively investing in the development of regional offices, IT workers still consider the country as a comfortable place for relocation, and the government supports IT initiatives and promotes the inflow of investment. In any case, the problems will have to be solved in the foreseeable future. Without this, it is impossible to accelerate the development of the industry.
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