Ukrainian top management is racing to Kazakhstan
“Ukrainian top and middle managers, financiers, engineers and advertisers are leaving for Kazakhstan to build their careers,” writes the Kiev magazine “Novoe Vremya,” explaining the trend to high Kazakh salaries, a fast-growing economy and the presence of decent vacancies in this Central Asian country.
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The publication cites as an example the spouses Zhanna and Taras Parkhomenko, top managers of the Ukrainian telecommunications giant Kyivstar. Having received an offer, they went to Kazakhstan, where the husband headed the telecommunications company KaR-Tel (TM Beeline), and the wife got a job in the largest investment group in Kazakhstan, Verny Capital.
Quite a lot of Ukrainians have already followed their example, and even more want to repeat this path, the magazine continues, citing the words of Zhanna Parkhomenko: “Not a week goes by without a request coming to me: “We would like to work in Kazakhstan.”
The trend is confirmed by Tatyana Nikitovich, director of the Kyiv recruiting company Smart Solutions, which opened a representative office in Moscow and Astana several years ago. According to her, in Ukraine it is necessary to look for vacancies; the labor market has sank in Russia as well. “But in Kazakhstan there are a lot of vacancies, and employees are needed there all the time,” Nikitovich notes. – The salary level is higher there. Stable economy."
According to Dosym Satpayev, director of the Almaty company Risk Assessment Group, the Kazakh market is developing so quickly that the training of specialists for its current needs cannot keep up with it, and therefore, he says, vacancies are “filled by foreign citizens.”
It is interesting that in Kazakhstan, the Russian language gives a competitive advantage over Western applicants.
“For example, the Kazakh Beeline has 2000 employees - in addition to the Kazakhs, representatives of 27 nationalities work here,” points out Novoye Vremya. – The working language here, as in many companies, is Russian. His knowledge in Kazakh conditions is, although weak, still a competitive advantage over “legionnaires” from the West.”
Tatyana Nikitovich says that recently there has been a strong demand in Kazakhstan for Ukrainian mining engineers from the mining industry. “Kazakh recruits quite carefully scoured Central and Eastern Ukraine, luring specialists to their enterprises,” the magazine reports her words. “Many went.”
“For the last year and a half, Ukrainians have been going there a lot,” Nikitovich reports. “There’s already a whole Ukrainian diaspora formed there – people who come to work.”
At the same time, in most large Kazakh companies, salaries are tied to the dollar, which workers from Ukraine take advantage of.
“When the exchange rate dropped to 25 UAH per $1, I flew to Ukraine and spent $200 having a fun and good weekend,” the marketing director of the Kazakh telecommunications company Kcell, who fled to Kazakhstan from Ukraine at the height of the events on the Maidan, told the magazine. “Because prices have become almost two to three times lower for me than they were.”
Ukrainian top management is racing to Kazakhstan.