Post-Pandemic Growth, Skills Gap, and 17 Resumes per Vacancy in Kazakhstan’s IT Market
New research by Ranking.kz shows that Kazakhstan’s IT labor market is expanding rapidly but facing growing mismatches between available skills and employer demand.
Also, the Bureau of National Statistics reports that the number of specialists in “computer programming, consulting, and related services” has more than tripled in recent years. Notably, in 2020 IT employment increase by 76.7 percent (from 6,900 to 12,100 workers).
There are 19,500 officially registered programmers, developers, and AI specialists as of June 2025.
According to 2024 survey by Kolesa Group, the median IT specialist is a 26-year-old male with three to five years of experience, working in fintech as a mid-level data analyst, earning approximately 700,000 tenge ($1,300) per month, and having switched jobs twice.
IT headcount of international companies rose by 17 to 37 percent between 2021 and 2024. Meanwhile, the share of employees aged 26-30 increased by 15 percentage points.
Another problem is competition for jobs. There are just 580 vacancies on the national electronic labor exchange list and 9,700 resumes in the “IT and telecommunications” category (nearly 17 applicants per position). The highest disparity, with 655 resumes for just four openings, was in the Mangystau region. Then followed Almaty (1,500 candidates for 133 roles) and Astana (1,000 applicants for 124 positions).
The main criterion is work experience: one to five years of experience is required for 61 percent of vacancies, and more than five years for 8 percent. Junior specialists can apply for only 31 percent vacancies. Meanwhile, only 22.9 percent of job seekers are senior-level, and 48 percent are entry-level.
As Ekaterina Rehert, founder of DataBoom, said, everyone from small businesses to multinationals, use AI today. It raises the bar for employees, making basic tools no longer enough.
The data by Kolesa Group shows the rise of IT salaries by 40 percent between 2021 and 2024. An even steeper increase was reported by the Bureau of National Statistics: salaries in programming and consulting grew by 2.5 times, reaching 1.2 million tenge in Q2 2025. The growth of wage gap between IT professionals and the national average attained 1.7 times in 2020 and 2.8 times in 2025.
The highest salaries (1.6 million tenge or $2,900 per month) belonged to machine learning engineers, then followed data scientists (1.1 million) and data warehouse specialists (1.08 million). The salary of Big Data professionals in finance attained 986,300 tenge, while it is just 177,600 tenge for similar roles in the public sector.
As The World Economic Forum forecasts, by 2030, approximately 22 percent of jobs will undergo transformation, 170 million new roles will appear and 82 million will vanish. Automation and digitalization will reshape nearly 39 percent of job skills. The roles of Big Data specialists, fintech engineers (+92%), AI and ML experts (+83%), software developers (+57%), and data analysts (+41%) will undergo the fastest growth.
Source Link