On February 26, 2020, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted a resolution on labour migration to Ukraine of 5,000 Western IT specialists. This decision provoked discussions and controversy both within the IT environment and within the local labor market.

The Channel24 website contacted “INFOTECH” to enquire whether the company experiences the shortage of qualified personnel and how Ukrainian specialists will compete with their foreign counterparts for employment in the local IT companies.

Igor Gorodetskiy, Deputy Production Director of the State-Owned Enterprise “INFOTECH”:

“We can only guess the reason behind such an increase of these quotas. One assumption would be that there are some large-scale startups from the Ministry of Digital Transformation that no one knows about yet.

Many outsourcing companies have representation beyond Ukraine and, from my experience, Ukrainian specialists are sent to projects in other countries (from Poland to the United States) considerably more often. It is rare to attract specialists here from abroad. Who knows, maybe they indeed lack the staff.

However, this will lead to a further imbalance on the labour market, since there are many more candidates than there are vacancies available. Of course, we are far away from the unemployment in the IT industry, but filling 98% of all jobs available with foreign specialists will make the employment of local IT specialists problematic.

I would recommend them to already work on improving the number and the quality of skills they have to become more desirable for the production and the State-Owned IT companies that currently remain the most stable. “

Yevhen Onyshchak, Head of the Human Resources Department of the State-owned enterprise “INFOTECH”:

”According to unofficial data, there are about 4,000 IT companies in Ukraine. Therefore, our companies forced to compete fiercely for talent not only among themselves but also with the representatives of other countries.”

In my opinion, the quota increase for foreign IT specialists aims at reducing the imbalance and the tension in the IT market, caused by the acute shortage of highly qualified domestic specialists.

Currently, there’s a tendency on the labour market (according to the specialized information resources DOU and Djinni.co) towards an increase in the number of candidates looking for work in the field of information technology. We also see that this indicator tends to increase; therefore, this situation will only get worse in the foreseeable future.

Time will tell how the IT labour market in Ukraine will develop. IT is integrated into all sectors of the world economy, meaning that the global trend to overcome the economic crisis and the rejuvenation of economic development will directly affect the development of the IT industry.”

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