Developing Educational Programs Using Russian IT Job Market Analysis

The paper presents an approach to developing new educational programs for information technologies (IT) specialists using job market analysis. We developed a set of innovative software tools for collecting data from job sites and analyzing the data using machine learning algorithms. The tools were used to create a dataset of job advertisements from popular Russian job site HeadHunter for a period from 2006 until 2020. Both tools and dataset are freely available on the Internet. In order to develop the educational programs, we analyzed the demand for IT professions and programming languages, as well as joint occurrence of skills in job descriptions. To demonstrate the possibilities of our approach, two educational programs were created: a JavaScript-based program for Web Development and a Python-based program for Data Science. Developing the educational programs based on the requirements of the job market allows graduates to increase their employability. During the programs, students not only study the foundation of the profession such as programming languages, but also acquire a complete set of skills required to work in demanded positions.