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Study: the perfect training for an IT professional

We study IT specialists together with the Grams research group from St. Petersburg State University. The sample of respondents is still small, but interesting trends are already visible. We will share them so that you will be guided in how you are doing your career in IT and how this scenario is changing. Supplement the research with your opinion!

We started this study because IT professionals often become our students. Now everyone has been quarantined en masse, and many services are being transformed into online ones, including educational ones. This made our research even more relevant: we need to understand how to make online learning really effective in IT, not “for show”.

Therefore, it was important for us to find the answer to several questions:

  • Do IT professionals themselves want to receive additional education? What for?
  • What is the most useful and convenient format for submitting material to online?
  • What duration, intensity, subjects of the courses seems attractive?
  • What is the optimal course cost? Is it difficult to pay for courses ourselves or stay on?

Now online questioning has passed IT employees of VKontakte and DataArt. We can do this study better together - answer 12 questions here , and we will share the updated data when there are 500 respondents. Here are some interesting hypotheses that we have already outlined.

Motivation


More than half of the “newcomers” who have been working in IT for 1 to 5 years do not have a higher education in IT. It is logical that they consider additional courses necessary for career growth. It can be assumed that if the proportion of self-taught people increases, this will lead to an even greater popularization of additional education.



Most of the interviewed IT-specialists at least once took some courses (77.1%). 80.2% chose the course themselves, and not as part of corporate training. Moreover, almost half of the respondents paid for training on their own, among them 16.5% paid for the course from 10 tr up to 50 tr, and 6.6% paid more than 50 tr

At the same time, there is no dependence between the salary of a specialist and the cost of the last year. Even those respondents whose salary is less than 55 tr, paid for courses from 25 tr up to 50 tr Moreover, among IT professionals receiving less than 50 tr there are generally no people who believe that continuing education courses are not important for their career. It was in this salary group that the majority underwent additional training for a fee.



Format


The preferences in the format of training were divided almost equally: 50.8% of respondents considered the online format the most convenient, 49.2% - offline. The last course for the majority of respondents was online - 67%.

It is easiest for IT professionals to receive information in Telegram and Instagram, and to perceive it in video format, this makes the Coursera, Open Education and Youtube platforms popular.

There is a direct correlation between the intensity of the courses and the assessment given by the respondents. Most often, negative assessments were given to courses that took less than 2 hours a week. Courses with an intensity of 2 to 5 hours per week were much more useful (grades 6 and 7).



Skills


Courses not directly related to IT are interesting for 61% of respondents. The majority of respondents agreed with the opinion that soft skills can be a decisive factor for career development of an IT specialist (35.6% fully agree and 26.3% partially agree). Despite this, most of the recent courses (82%) were devoted to programming skills.

Many IT professionals find soft skills important in their careers, but in reality, most learn hard. It follows that soft skills are more of a declared value.

In IT, specialists with experience from 1 to 11 years are more likely to rely on soft skills in their careers. Old-timers (12 years and older) deny the crucial role of soft skills for professional growth.



We are waiting for you to confirm or challenge our findings!

Here you can download the full research report with a small sample and comment on individual places in it. But we also ask you to help us make this sample wider. It seems that this data can be useful both for us and for you - because additional training will become better. So take the survey here , it will take about two minutes. We will share the results with you when we reach 500 respondents.

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