Recently, the problem of Junov’s rejection has become more and more obvious in the market of IT specialists. That is, Middle and Senior specialists are in short supply, everyone needs them, everyone wants them, but Juniors are not needed “under any circumstances”. After all, not so long ago, green university graduates were bought by rich IT functionaries right at the exit from the educational institution, and for decent money, the more kindly they disturbed and worried the rest of the market segment.

And now everything changed. Why did this happen and how to resist it?

With the collapse of the Western IT market for domestic developers, and the departure of large vendors from Russia, local IT companies have changed the coordinates of the assessment of responsibility for the result, as well as the resources spent on its achievement. Managers began to treat estimates and resource plans differently. Where before it was possible to raise young Junas for yourself during the implementation of the project for the sake of bourgeois money, now it is not up to the mark. Of course, I exaggerate and condense, but such a tendency is clearly visible. So let’s figure it out.

So, to begin with, it is necessary to agree on exactly how to identify a specialist called Junior. In the broad masses, this category includes everyone in a row, from university graduates to young employees who have worked sometimes for 3 or even 5 years. Agree that the coverage of capabilities and skills in such a range is spread far too wide, and therefore associated with business risks – hiring an employee who is not suitable for production (at least for the near future).

In order to avoid confusion and misreading, this segment should be cut into separate parts.

What our universities produce in most cases can be called “Confident User” and no more. Even if the champion of the Olympiad is before us, real IT production requires much deeper and more diverse skills and abilities than a student could accumulate by participating in university greenhouse competitions. The situation is even worse with graduates of remote IT schools who are trained without separation from the main production (especially if it is not IT). This is how the first obstacle arises on the way of yesterday’s graduate to the IT profession – they are too far from the realities of production.

If a young specialist is lucky and manages to break into an IT company, at the beginning of his career he is still not independent and critically dependent on the environment. Someone must organize his work: explain the task, adjust the course of its execution, monitor, encourage or quarrel, etc. Not every employer is ready to bother with such a kindergarten. This period of formation can be called an internship, and a specialist can be called an intern. And it’s not Junior yet.

Only when one young organism combines the ability to formalize and clarify incoming tasks, plan ways to solve them and the ability to achieve results, including, if necessary, escalating problems upwards, then we can consider that we have a Junior Specialist. At the same time, the employee must be able not only to ensure the performance of his party in the general process of production of the Information System, but also to understand the place assigned to him in the organization and who are his associates. In this case, of course, we are talking about tasks of low complexity, but we are talking about Juniors.

The Trainee’s path described above may last differently over time and depends on the conditions under which it actually takes place. If the mentee is purposefully trained, taught and controlled the process itself, i.e. his path is thorny and filled with trials, then the training time is drastically reduced, and professional qualities develop more dynamically. I call such Junior a “coloring”, as opposed to a “cub”, which is somehow shaped by the environment itself in the wild conditions of indifference and indifference.

In general, we have such stable stages of maturation of a young specialist. “Confident User”, “Trainee”, and finally “Junior”, which can be “wild” or “coloring”. In my experience, the tyamous Junior “Coloring” is the same Middle specialist, but with minimal experience. Such a craftsman, always useful in a professional team. You can dump all the monotonous work on it, hang the completion of the started work, which no longer involves intrigue, etc. Since it is not expensive, the team using it reduces costs, and Junior himself grows and gains experience, including absorbing social models of behavior, the most assertive specialists.

But the successful achievement of the Junior level, nowadays, still guarantees the right to parade freely for a young specialist from the IT industry. Yes, when Junior applies for a job now, he is usually rejected immediately in response, without a chance to try to talk. The employer simply does not want to take the risk. Although, I know cases when an applicant outlined a year of experience in his resume, called himself a Middle specialist and successfully accepted a job after passing an interview.

That is, the entry threshold has a very conditional nature and a subjective assessment. But I’ll make a reservation once again: the applicant in this case must be fully trained, both professionally and psychologically, to present himself as a Middle, to feel like a Middle, to behave like a Middle. After all, it is a lie, it is clearly guessed by an experienced interviewer. This, of course, is another obstacle on the way to the profession, but not a dead end.

In such situations, training helps, pulling the candidate to pass the interview by an experienced trainer – a guide to the world of IT. I suspect that the soil for hate appears here. For example, you drag grief specialists into the industry by deception, and then our services fail at an inopportune moment. Again, from my experience, I note that a “trained” Junior is much more effective than an underdeveloped Middle.

This trend is becoming increasingly popular in business. In IT companies, departments for the training of IT specialists are being opened, and forms of an effective educational process are being groped. With the support of IT companies, the very idea of ​​providing teams of young specialists for outstaffing assumes a more guaranteed level of service quality. In this case, the Junior specialist is not left alone to overcome the unknown, but behind him is a team of experienced comrades who will get him out of the most difficult situations.

Thus, the following conclusions can be drawn:

Firstly, the problem of luring junior specialists in the current market cannot be overcome at the state level without the involvement of IT companies in the decision-making process. No, the market will gradually decide all this, but over what period and with what losses of resources?

Secondly, this thorny path for IT companies can be facilitated by the transformation of IT education in universities. The time has come to move away from the patchwork teaching of individual IT disciplines, to organize the cultivation of IT specialists in the paradigm of reproduction in the learning process – the activities of industrial IT production, throughout the entire training period. I posted my thoughts on this in more detail on my YouTube channel