St Petersburg IT market: conditions and challenges.

May 15, 2009 - PRLog -- “Right now, during the crisis times, we have to revise IT-education approach, educational results and their productivity. The practical terms of education should be extended, students are to be more involved into business practices and gain skills in it”, - stated Mr. Terekhov
“Every company is obviously interested in saving its “gold pool”, most important and skillful employees but unfortunately, company’s resources are limited and even the most talented and educated programmer but with no current tasks, can not be employed longer than a definite period of time”.
According to professor Terekhov, current depressing economical situation is in its sort “the moment of truth” that have made excessively high bonus expectations of some young developers more real-life. The crisis has significantly reduced the number of job places of managers and programmers. They are in general more or less educated people, who are smart enough to invest their small profits into themselves, their education, but not to squander.  
As Mr. Terekhov put it, we can expect the surge of interest towards the second higher education degree application, complimentary professional courses and other forms of education. Software engineering chair of Mathematics and Mechanics department, St Petersburg State University, run by professor Terekhov, has already done several steps in this direction. Intel and Microsoft laboratories are successfully cooperating with the chair. The chair covers students’ travel expenses referred to R&D conferences visits. Top level IT managers hold seminars at the chair and share their knowledge about innovations and investment.
Finally, Andrey Terekhov stressed the fact that today’s IT-education requires dramatic changes. Basically, it will cover integration of international educational standards, new “economics for IT” courses are to become familiar and be used throughout Russia but not in several elite departments. They are to become the style of Russian IT-education.
The roundtable program consisted of the 2 parts: “IT market features during the global crisis” and “HR practices in the new conditions”. Questions and Answers session was addressed mostly to Mr. Terekhov.
For instance, one of the questions was about the prospective of Mathematics and Mechanics department graduates in the nearest 2-3 years. According to Mr. Terekhov, the graduates will not have any reason to worry. “You will not see them on the job fairs. AT Software doors are always open to them”.
Mr. Terekhov’s activity in the field of the tax reduction for the IT-industry was another interesting topic for discussion. Currently, Mr.Terekhov is one of a few IT- leaders who paid much attention to this question. There are already some results: the Act about social insurance tax for software exporters was passed in 2006. Now this tax is collected according to the regression rate in relation to the annual employee’s income. In order to use this law, the companies are to be accredited in the Financial Agency for Information Technology (FAIT) and AT Software was one of the first companies to do that,  - explained Andrey Terekhov. – “Later we have assisted our IT partners and colleagues with accreditation. At the moment more than 200 companies are applied to the Agency”.

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