Staff Gap: Amounts and Factors of It-Specialists Deficit in Russia

Abstract

The article focuses on the idea that speeding-up of digitalization, growth in virtual dominant and technological burden of production processes require a sufficient number and quality of highly-qualified IT-professionals with an adequate set of knowledge, competences and relevant experience meeting challenges of the new model of development. It is clear that in spite of popularity of IT-specialists and high demand for IT-education today’s Russia faces a serious shortage of IT-specialists of different level of training. The scale of staff deficit in Russian IT-sectors was estimated on the basis of reports by national and overseas analytical agencies. The method of content-analysis helped identify a set of factors with cumulative effect that piled up in previous years: inability of Russian academic education institutions training IT-specialists to meet the requirements of digital sectors; speeding processes of virtualization in pandemic period in Russia that worsened IT-staff balance; outflow and relocation of IT-specialists in conditions of changing geo-political situation and so on. A conclusion was drawn that staff gap in national digital sectors is a medium-term trend, which demands introduction of effective measures that will be able to cover the needs of digital economy in IT-specialists in the period 2023-2030.

Keywords

• digital-technology
• digital economy
• it-specialists deficit
• it-specialists relocation
• factors of staff asymmetry