During the round table in the Park of high technologies in Minsk, the issues of further development of cooperation between the IT industry and specialized IT faculties of Belarusian universities, improvement of the quality of IT education, as well as current problems of training IT personnel and possible solutions were discussed.

The event was attended by the deans of all specialized IT faculties that train IT specialists for the Park of High Technologies, representatives of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Belarus, the HTP administration and the largest resident companies of the Park.

The key topic of the discussion at the round table were the results of the research conducted by the company "Sberbank - Technologies" on the topic "IT education in Belarus".

The results of the conducted research proved that the development of the sector of development of computer programs and provision of IT services in Belarus is characterized by steady growth during the last ten years. The average annual growth rate is 35-40%, which is much higher than European and world indicators. According to experts' estimates, the export of computer services in Belarus in 2018 may grow to 1 billion US dollars.

Predicting that in 3 years, the rapid growth of big data technologies and services will create a massive demand for specialists in this field in Belarus and the world, Oleksiy Tolstikov, the curator of academic programs of Yandex in Belarus, expressed the opinion that it is necessary to start training today. University education programs, in addition to fundamental knowledge in mathematics, should provide knowledge about modern approaches to building distributed storage and machine learning.

Having familiarized those present with the main world trends of the mobile development market, Ihor Yudin, director of the Red Rock company, noted that it is necessary to introduce optional classes on architecture and design of mobile device interfaces to the existing training programs.

In addition to issues of improving the quality of training of IT specialists, the participants of the round table discussed the appropriateness of changes to the list of entrance exams for admission to universities for certain IT specialties, joint activities of the Park of High Technologies and universities on the development of professional and qualified standards for software developers and testing specialists, forms and ways of cooperation in the preparation of educational programs.

According to the material: HTP