Establishment of a training and practice center at the Kharkiv National University of Radio and Electronics (KhNURE) has been welcomed by students and faculty alike and provided new opportunities for the development of IT in Ukraine. “Outsourcing means hiring outside experts to perform a task. Students will benefit from it through being able to apply their knowledge to paid work already, receiving high wages from one company or another,” the KhNURE trainee Yevhen says.
A side effect of the IT industry development in Ukraine is the fact that the country’s best intellectual forces work for foreign companies, causing the so-called “brain drain.” Director of the Outsourcing Center Natalia Bilous maintains that this project aims exactly to prevent this unfortunate development, bringing our “brains” to the domestic market of Ukraine. “Our project is designed to support domestic producers. We received a 750,000-euro grant from the European Union for three years, and much of the money goes to our Ukrainian partners or covers our equipment costs and faculty salaries. Our project was founded in October 2012 and aims to improve the practical training of our professionals, we are ready to cooperate with domestic enterprises as our customers. We have a huge sector of small and medium-sized businesses that cannot pay the prices demanded by large IT companies. Since we are a non-profit organization, engaging our undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and professionals from other Ukrainian universities in our projects, our services are much more affordable for Ukrainian companies. With our business growing, we will be able to provide services abroad later on.”
The center is a practice and on-job training facility, Bilous explains. Its students master all the jobs that are in demand on the IT outsourcing market, including introduction of automation in any business, development of information systems and centers, designing and promoting websites, system administration, data protection, data mining, and various subsystems of human resources. Students are tested and interviewed first, stipulating what training and practice they need, and then get involved in a project.
