Comparing self-perceptions of employability among specialized roles in the IT industry

Introduction. Recently, due to the constant changes in professional responsibilities and economic instability, the importance of research on self-perceived employability has increased dramatically. For the IT industry, which is the first to be affected by global crises and disruptive innovations, this is even more relevant due to the rapid changes in the IT labor market. Previous studies have focused on peaceful contexts and have not taken into account the comparison of different IT roles in the context of self-perceived employability. Objective. To investigate the impact of specialized roles on internal, external, and general self-perceptions of employability. Methods. Data from an online survey of 144 IT specialists were collected between October 2023 and January 2024, and multivariate and univariate analyses of variance were applied to test the statistical significance of differences in values ​​across all three groups of IT specialists. Results. Contrary to expectations, no significant differences were found between the three groups in terms of internal, external, and integral self-perceived employability. It is shown that the equal demand for IT specialists and the general uncertainty in wartime conditions smooth out possible role differences in self-perceived employability. Conclusions. The effectiveness of universal approaches to career development in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war is proven. The study contributes to the scientific literature on employability by highlighting contextual influences, in particular the war factor, and emphasizes the value of universal measures for career development in the IT sector