Soft and Hard Skills for the Development of Young IT Specialists: Actual Challenges in the Conditions of Martial Law in Ukraine

The article focuses on the analysis of problems and the creation of proposals for improving the development of young IT-specialists in Ukraine. For this purpose, we performed a sociological study among young IT-specialists, and carried out a comparative analysis of educational programs for their training. The subject of the research is competencies and the need for their improvement as demanded by the labor market in modern conditions. We defined the key requirements for the development of relevant competencies in demand of the Ukrainian market as per the obtained results. The requirements are professional skills (knowledge of the programming language), knowledge of foreign languages, personal skills, time management skills, and working with modern IT technologies. The factors such as a need for developing commitment to the company, patriotism, creating a favorable (non-toxic) atmosphere, conscientious work, and developing a personalized career trajectory for a young IT-specialist turned out to be significant. For the most part, it is the result of an insufficient budget for the development of young IT-specialists, as well as their lack of motivation for development. Therefore, we propose to study the criteria for the selection of learning methods that take into account the characteristics of different generations and build individual development plans based on the principle of continuous education.