Yulia Solyaeva, Consultant with Antal Russia’s IT recruitment department
During the recent downturn, large numbers of companies quickly froze or slowed down their IT projects, and cut the number of people working in their IT departments significantly. Consequently this severe fall in IT spend drastically affected both local system integrators and foreign vendors (companies producing software and hardware) present on the Russian market.
The situation on the market had stabilized somewhat by the start of 2010, as companies gradually began to unfreeze certain IT projects. The highest activity has been witnessed amongst businesses which are more dependent on IT, such as banks, investment companies and mobile operators. Those professionals most in demanded are such professionals as high qualified heads of IT projects as well as harder-to-fine professionals such as business analysts (capital issues), administrators of less common databases.
System integrators however still suffer from a lack of projects and therefore have fewer vacancies open.
2009 was a year of mergers and acquisitions, with many companies joining their resources including those in IT. Therefore candidates in the field of data storage systems and employees possessing deep knowledge in integration platforms are becoming more and more in demand.
One trend reappearing is more IT companies from abroad entering the Russian market thanks to changes in tariff legislations implemented in 2009. To gain market share in Russia they need not only strong sales people, but also high profile pre-sales professionals, who are aware of the local market and have strong presentation, as well as technical skills.
In the situation of the growing competitive activity, companies with a long history on the Russian market also need to attract new clients and require strong technical experts, who can promote their solutions to clients and partners.
Western companies, who as yet have no representative office in Russia, are often choosing to hire professionals to work on a contract basis, which is very profitable both for employee, and convenient for the employer. Whilst for many years this was considered unusual in Russia, it is not seen as much more the norm.
The affectivity of company web-sites has become increasingly important for high profile companies, as they gain interest in optimising their internal and external portals and therefore require the skills of people in positions such as Head of Internet projects, who can make their website more attractive and informative as well as being responsible for effective search engine optimisation.
In the downturn and post downturn times businesses strive to save resources. In order to analyse key performance indicators (KPIs) effectively they often need to implement BI Systems (Business Intelligence). Therefore professionals with the profound experience of participating in such projects are also in quite high demand.
As for the salary trends for the technical professionals in the first months of 2010, there are no significant changes in comparison with the last year. Still only highly qualified and rare professionals, who even in the downturn times didn’t suffer of the lack of interesting job offers can count on the high salaries now. What has changed – for the better, many senior managers would claim – are that employee expectations have returned to much more realistic levels.
Nevertheless, it’s not time to put the rose-tinted spectacles back on just yet – technical professionals working in consulting still suffer from a lack of projects and therefore can not count on being paid big bonuses.
