Abstract:

For Russia and CIS countries the information technologies (IT) sector promises to become a major driver for modernization and building of information society; what’s more, the factors of vast territories and uneven population bring up the importance of the IT solutions as a connectivity element for state and economy management. The internal IT market is growing rapidly; and the IT-specialists provided by the local educational system are still in demand globally, though there are some important changes to be made. One of the main problems of professional IT-training in Russia is the difference between the university’s qualifications and real market requirements to job applicants. industry demands concrete IT-skills and knowledge necessary for the job (according the IT European Qualification Framework (EQF)) while universities graduates have classic education mainly and they need to be taught on workplaces; even industry of the Russian neighbouring regions to Kazakhstan demands more than 10500 graduates in software engineering each year which should be retrained by business. Nowadays situation in IT professional education in Russia and Kazakhstan could be generally characterized like “each university develops its own courses based on practical knowledge of academic staff more than on real IT-business demands”. Building of effective system of EQF-based system of professional IT-training in Russia and Kazakhstan universities is an objective of the joint European Tempus project “PICTET: EQF-based professional ICT training for Russia and Kazakhstan”. System of professional ICT education should be more flexible than classic university degree education and must reflect current labour and business market and will help universities graduates to start careers and IT-staff to improve/update their skills and qualifications according to modern tendencies in IT. The project unites 5 Russian and 5 Kazakh universities, professional IT-companies interested in IT-specialists, Russian Union of IT-directors and EU universities (experienced in professional IT education or staff of which participated in the development of EU e-qualifications framework) and European universities from Belgium, Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, Spain, Romanian IT Association. Most of the partner institutions in Russia and Kazakhstan are situated in Russian-Kazakh frontier region and are united not only by the joint educational-business environment but by close collaboration in education and research confirmed by bilateral and multilateral agreements. The system of the professional IT-education will be developed and evaluated by the end of 2016.

Keywords:

Tempus, information technologies, professional education.