"Development companies in Russia operate differently. Some expect that a specialist will come and immediately be able to do everything. For example, we train testers for ourselves. For this purpose, various training programs have been organized and have been in effect for several years," says Elena Volkova, HR Director of Devlonika LLC (Softline Group). "One of the company's locations has a whole hub of testers. And starting from the second or third year, young IT specialists are attracted there. They immerse themselves in practical tasks, gain high-quality knowledge and adopt the experience of senior colleagues, and undergo internships. In 90% of cases, such guys remain in our team and work on important and large projects, growing together with Devlonika."
Alexey Kutashev, on the chile whatsapp number database contrary, sees a trend that in the conditions of a shortage of qualified IT personnel, businesses are increasingly turning to retraining or additional training of employees: "Even according to Performance Lab data, three quarters of organizations invest in additional training of personnel. Among the projects of T1 Digital Academy, there is an example of how the customer company was able to effectively solve all the problems related to the lack of necessary skills and knowledge among IT specialists thanks to the properly developed content of the training course: manual testers were retrained in Java so that they could become automation engineers. The program included detailed consultations, assignments, materials and QA sessions. Working with managers made it possible to prepare real automation tasks for graduates. The results of a recent study by T1 Digital Academy indicate that interaction with an educational organization that customizes additional professional education programs to the specifics of a particular business is optimal for improving the skills of employees. Developing their own training programs for organizations on their own is expensive and time-consuming, and creating full-fledged educational departments can take from several months to two years."
Growing interest in outsourcing
The authors of the study also found that the share of non-core employees involved in testing is decreasing. If at the turn of 2020 and 2021, only engineers in 18% of companies were involved in testing, at the time of the current study, such companies already accounted for 31%. The salary level of testers, depending on their qualifications, is 120-210 thousand rubles.
On average, the quality assurance department staff includes up to 20 employees (45% of respondents). Another third of respondents (31%) noted that their staff includes 20-100 units. According to the authors of the study, part of the needs are covered by freelance employees: about half of the teams are already working or planning to start working with outsourcing companies. Companies are also ready to pay more to each individual specialist, but at the same time maintain a smaller staff (up to 20 specialists) and, if necessary, turn to an outsourcer.
Ksenia Zamukhovskaya noted that salary forks are more typical for companies that are engaged in custom development or organize outsourced testing: "An automation tester in companies like ours is a unique specialist at the intersection of database administration, programming and testing. As a result, his salary is in the range close to the role of an engineer and developer, and reaches 440 thousand rubles and higher for a senior-level specialist, which is significantly higher than in the analysis of "Performance Lab".
Artem Kostryukov sees a trend of growing interest in outsourcing: "Many of our clients, especially in fintech, retail and industry, have both internal development and quality assurance staff and expanded teams, largely due to outsourcing. This is due to the specifics of development cycles: in large projects, testing cycles can shift closer to release dates and require more resources to check reliability, fault tolerance, security and compliance with functional requirements. Most often, it is at such peak moments that teams from outside are brought in."