The expert spoke about the oversaturation of the IT industry by specialists

Although the popularity of IT education for children continues to grow, the labor market in the industry is seriously changing. This was announced to Izvestia on February 20 by Daria Kudryavtseva, HR director of Selecty, a company specializing in recruiting and outsourcing IT personnel.

According to the expert, many parents perceive the IT sphere as a start in life for children. Currently, their education is the most successful segment of the Russian EdTech market. According to the Smart Ranking agency, in the first quarter of 2025, it even surpassed the adult market in terms of volume.: The revenue of the children's segment amounted to 14.1 billion rubles, and the adult segment — 12.3 billion rubles.

Thanks to the active development of information technology, a career in IT has become prestigious since the mid-2010s. The expert noted that at that time there was an acute shortage of specialists in the field, and companies were offering more and more generous offers in the fight for candidates. According to Kudryavtseva, in the mass consciousness, working in the IT field has become synonymous with well-being in life, which was partly facilitated by the players of the EdTech market themselves, advertising a "posh" life and creating false hopes among applicants.

"Under their influence, many people took retraining courses, and parents began to orient children towards IT specialties and teach programming from an early age. But in 2025, the situation has changed. Companies have curtailed projects that require large investments and do not bring profit, and the gradual saturation of new specialists has led to the IT staffing market entering a stage of maturity," she stressed.

The specialist noted that under the influence of all these factors, hiring has decreased, and the growth rate of salaries has slowed down. She clarified that the number of active resumes per vacancy, in turn, doubled from 9.8% in January 2025 to 21.3% in the same month of this year. According to her, this indicates a strong glut of the market in terms of applicants against the background of declining demand from employers.

Kudryavtseva noted that a similar thing happened among economists and lawyers in the early 2000s: after a rapid surge of interest in the labor market, there was an oversupply of specialists. According to her, the IT industry can expect a similar scenario. At the same time, novice specialists found themselves in the most difficult situation.

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"It has become much more difficult for newcomers to find an entry point into the field: the number of candidates for one vacancy sometimes reaches several thousand people. Functional testing, for example, remains one of the few specialties that can be the beginning of a career in a company. There is always a demand for this profile, as experienced professionals are reluctant to accept such work," she added.

At the same time, the expert stressed that higher education is not a guarantee of employment or a mandatory requirement on the part of the employer. According to her, it will be difficult to enter machine learning without education, for example, but the situation is different for more common specialties (system analysts, backend developers). At the same time, she stressed that it takes longer for people without specialized IT education to enter the profession.

Against the background of increased competition among candidates, according to Kudryavtseva, those who were able to prove themselves as interesting as possible win. One of the ways out for a novice specialist may also be a paid internship, when a person pays for the opportunity to work within the framework of this project. According to her, specialized networking has become especially important, which is easier to start at a university.

At the same time, Kudryavtseva noted that specialists who chose the IT industry for the sake of high incomes at the start would be disappointed. According to statistics, there is no revenue growth in the information technology sector. She also noted that there are no prerequisites for this. According to the expert, the real incomes of IT specialists are declining: the nominal figures may grow, but their purchasing power is falling.

"Of course, IT remains one of the "privileged castes" partly because the industry remains in demand from large businesses and the government, which provides education support and unique benefits for specialists and companies. <...> But you still need to be aware that this is a rather difficult path. And those who chose it for themselves will need a sincere interest in this area, in addition to the desire to receive a high salary," the expert concluded.

According to the service's research hh.ru According to Izvestia, which was reviewed on February 19, Russian women began to apply for positions in the IT field more often. So, over the past five years, the proportion of women in this context has increased to 38%, although in 2021 they accounted for only 27% of resumes. It was clarified that the most popular job with information technology turned out to be among teenage girls: in the category of applicants aged 17 and under, they account for 47% of resumes.

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