According to Coursera's latest Global Skills Report, Kazakhstan showed to have one of the highest demands for skill training in the area of technology compared with the rest of the world. This means that users from Kazakhstan who flock to Coursera have a higher tendency to take courses related to computer science, applied mathematics, software engineering, and programming languages.
The great reskilling
Our world is changing and so is the way we work. Every industry, from agriculture to manufacturing, is going through automation and digital transformation while global instability, spurred by the recent coronavirus pandemic, makes ensuring job security and long-term career growth more important than ever.
The Global Skills Report claims that an estimated 85 million jobs may disappear, while another 97 million new ones will take their place. However, at the moment, it is difficult to gauge which skills will be required for employment.
Coursera analyzed the data collected from more than 100 million people who have used the online platform to learn new skills. They concentrated on three of the most important skill areas: business, technology, and data science.
The report grouped 102 countries by regional sections and gave a percentile ranking of the country's learner performance within each of the three subject domains. Learner growth and skill proficiency are influenced by a number of factors including internet access, economic and political conditions, educational background, local culture, and even personal background, such as age, gender and location. The percentile rankings are broken into four categories: lagging (25% or below), emerging (26-50%), competitive (51-75%) and cutting-edge (76% or above).
Kazakhstan ranked fifth after Indonesia, Belarus, Japan and Denmark in the cutting-edge category in the area of technology.
Kazakhstan received 96% in technology, 55% in data science and 31% in business. In terms of Coursera's global ranking, Kazakhstan's skill development jumped 54 positions to rank 24th.
The boost in learner activity from Kazakhstan can be accredited to the program subsidized by the ministry of labor and social protection which allowed the general public to apply for courses on Coursera free of charge. Akorda reported that the top 5 most popular courses among the Kazakh population were all related to IT skills, including Python, Adobe Photoshop, HTML, CSS, Android and basic programming languages.
The minister of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry, Bagdat Mussin, announced the news on his official social media pages with a statement reading that the government's Coursera initiative enabled 50,000 Kazakhstanis to get free access to 4,400 courses in Russian and English.
"In total, according to the analysis, 350,000 people have been trained from Kazakhstan all the time," he added.