THE CRITICAL ROLE OF SOFT SKILLS IN KAZAKHSTAN'S JOB MARKET FOR IT GRADUATES: JOB MARKET ANALYSIS

This study examines the alignment between academic offerings and market demands in Kazakhstan's Information Technology (IT) sector. The main objective is to identify existing gaps and to propose possible solutions to the issues in this field. The authors listed IT-related academic programs from universities throughout Kazakhstan and job vacancies from 3 leading job portals: enbek.kz, hh.kz, and careerjet.kz, from September 2023 to January 2024. The predominant soft skills in this filed were determined by (1) job categorization using K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and (2) the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) on job descriptions to find key skills required to these jobs. The present findings define the most significant soft skills corresponding to different IT clusters from analyzing the 450 job vacancies. Now, these findings might have huge implications for everyone involved in IT for education and job market for Kazakhstan. Additionally, the results of this study imply for enhancing existing curriculum for IT programs in Kazakhstan, and demonstrates the importance of a soft skills training for complementary IT studies. Thus, the findings of the study can shed a light on the discussion about IT education in Kazakhstan by determining the areas where the higher education system should tune up relevant skills to increase the employability of the graduates. Suggestions for future research are made to fill those gaps, and recommendations for universities, and industry partners.