Staff hunger is also not an aunt, or how to grow an IT specialist from a student

According to estimates by the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media of Russia, the shortage of personnel in the IT industry is estimated at 350-400 thousand specialists - almost as many as working in this area today. Analysis of the labor market (according to hh.ru) in the context of IT occupations suggests that annually the need for IT specialists increases by about 25%. So, with regard to the values ​​of 2016 by 2015, the growth of IT vacancies was 28%. About one of the ways to address the issue of shortage of personnel in our article.


Partner programs with universities help to solve the personnel issue, allowing to develop a whole range of areas of possible cooperation, starting with the organization of various joint events (job fair, career day, conferences, etc.) and ending directly with internships and joint programs for targeted student training.
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In the course of the development of federal state educational standards, Russian higher education institutions were given the opportunity to independently formulate the variable part of curricula, which allowed them to implement various educational profiles within the framework of one area of ​​training, allowing business to influence the content of educational programs.

What is useful for IT companies social partnership with universities, in addition to personnel advantages:

• a fundamental base is being formed for the positioning and development of the brand, the company's product, its universal introduction and use;
• it is possible to conduct research on the basis of the product, to create scientific schools in the departments;
• there is an opportunity to participate in the development of curricula, to influence the development strategy of professional educational programs;
• by promoting the organization and conduct of internships and internships for students, to have a priority right when choosing interns;
• to participate in the activities of universities (the day of initiation into students, scientific and practical conferences, round tables, etc.);
• it becomes possible to use the information platforms of universities for the placement of marketing materials.

Universities, in turn, receive a competitive advantage by introducing the latest information technologies into the educational process, as well as increasing the pool of employer companies, thereby expanding the employment opportunities for students. All this is an indicator of effectiveness and has a positive effect on the rating of the educational institution.

The practice of such cooperation is actively implemented in InfoWatch. The company takes an active part in the scientific life of many universities (about 20 universities, including the MIEM HSE, the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, etc.), leaders of the education market, invests in providing the educational process with licensed software, as well as in teaching faculty universities, is engaged in the development of teaching materials. The training department, created to support the educational process for InfoWatch products among employees, customers and partners, also actively interacts with the academic environment.

The system of cooperation with companies in each university is built in its own way. Somewhere, issues of cooperation with employers are handled by separate units, for example, the “Student Employment Department”, somewhere directly by deans or departments.

At the same time, universities are interested in cooperation with commercial companies as much, if not more, of the employers themselves! The fact is that the student employment rate is used in calculations during the annual monitoring of the effectiveness of universities. In other words, if this indicator does not satisfy the established value, the school may be considered ineffective, which can hit the university's ratings very much among the applicants and their parents.

For students, an internship or internship is an opportunity to form your resume, work on a real project and gain invaluable experience, which is so necessary for employment at the beginning of a career.

A few practical tips for organizing work with student interns:

1. Define in advance the format of cooperation with the university:

• direct employment, in which you place your vacancy on university sites, while concluding a partnership agreement with the university. You are starting to be invited to internal events (career day, job fair or various scientific conferences), where you get the opportunity to expand the company's stand, chat with students directly, conduct blitz-interviews, invite potential candidates for internships in the company;
• Targeted training programs in which you can influence what your potential trainee is learning at the initial stage of training, and prepare him for future duties. This cooperation involves participation in the formation of curricula for students in the working group. Such work is done, as a rule, by industry leaders, such as Yandex, Mail.ru, since appropriate investments are required for large-scale educational projects.

2. Examine training areas and profiles implemented by the university you are interested in to determine whether the professional competencies that are laid out by these programs meet your requirements. All information on areas of training and profiles, as a rule, is contained on the official websites of universities, where a potential employer can familiarize himself with the set of disciplines that students read. Determine those that are specifically in demand in your work and consider only the direction and profile you need as students.

3. When analyzing the curriculum, one should pay attention to the “spreading out” of disciplines in the programs. For example, sometimes mathematics and computer science may appear in the titles of programs in IT disciplines, but up to 70-80% of the study load is given to the first discipline, and computer science takes up to 5%. It is clear that such students are not suitable for IT specialties, but analyst interns are good enough.

4. Approach the choice of the university not only on the basis of the direction of student preparation, but also on the territorial distance from the company. The trainee student should be comfortable to get to the place of practice after classes. Ideally, in the conditions of Moscow or another large city, the road should not take more than an hour or require several transfers. For example, in JSC “InfoWatch”, students of the REU them. Plekhanov and one of the factors when choosing an internship site is precisely the territorial proximity of the office of InfoWatch JSC to one of the REU campuses. Plekhanov, where students of specialized areas of training.

5. The possibility of passing an educational, industrial and pre-diploma practice in a company greatly enhances the company's attractiveness to students, therefore it is better to clarify in advance at the university the list of required documents. It is difficult to advise any specific documents. It makes sense to find out directly in the partner universities, in the dean's offices or in the departments where you attract interns, since the format and set of documents may differ, depending on the university standards for the development of such documents.

6. When interviewing interns, you should move away from the usual interview formats. Do not ask about experience and competencies, especially for undergraduate students. Instead, it is worthwhile to offer them any tasks on the necessary topics, check ingenuity, logical thinking, find out the area of ​​interest, tell about what the department or team is doing, where he is invited, to observe the reaction. If the applicant shows genuine interest in the proposed tasks, it may be worthwhile to look at him, even if he has no experience in your field. Personal interest and intrinsic motivation helps to move mountains.

7. Do not overload the trainee with complex time-consuming tasks, it should be remembered that in addition to work, he also has a number of tasks at the university. For junior courses, small entry-level tasks that do not require high qualifications and experience, where the cost of a mistake is low, are best suited. At the start, these can be tasks for registration of applications, primary processing of calls, filling in any forms, and performing single-variant, sequentially described tasks. Undergraduate and undergraduate undergraduates can be assigned more complicated tasks, such as preparing reports, analyzing tasks, working with customers on simple projects, etc.

8. Based on the previous paragraph, you should carefully consider the tasks that can be delegated to the trainees and the form of control over their implementation. When controlling, one should take into account not only quantitative indicators (the number of completed tasks), but also qualitative ones (accuracy, errors, etc.).

9. In advance to take care of who will oversee the work of interns in the organization. For 3-4 interns, one curator is enough. This employee should not be overloaded with current work tasks and should be able to spend from work with students from 30% to 50% of their working time.

10. In no case do not assign supervision to your employees forcibly. Communication with trainees and training is a special kind of activity that not everyone likes, and the trainee may not have the best impression of the company after talking with a curator who is not interested in its success.

11. Prepare materials for acquaintance with working processes and company tools. This will help save a lot of curator time. In addition, in the process of describing workflows, there will most likely be "white" spots or discrepancies that you can resolve on the fly. For example, at InfoWatch JSC, part of the educational process is automated by means of a distance learning system and for an introductory lecture about the company, products, office equipment, work tools, etc. staff time is no longer wasted.

12. Consider introducing monetary incentives to the curators, tied to some measurable results - for example, to certain success of the interns. To assess their success, again, control data will be required, which was mentioned just above.

Adjustment of the IT company development strategy, in terms of cooperation with educational sites, allows not only increasing product demand and brand awareness, but also replenishing the workforce in the company, creating personnel reserves, selecting the best of the best, sharpening a student trainee to the needs of the company .

The authors are experts of InfoWatch Group:

Andrey Zarubin
Head of training and support for internal customers

Sergey Kharitonov
Head of educational projects