More than 18,000 people applied for the free educational program IT Fundamentals for Ukrainian Switchers. The number of registrations has set a record: it has exceeded 10 times the number of people who registered for an average EPAM University course before the war. But who are all those people? A survey conducted among program participants allowed us to create a portrait of a potential IT specialist after retraining.

71% of the course students are between the age of 18 and 44, with almost equal numbers of men and women. Almost a third part of the enrolled is from Kyiv, and one in every eight is from Kharkiv or Lviv. At the same time, 92% of respondents are based in Ukraine.

Potential switchers most frequently listed education, retail, banking, and the service sector as their previous professional fields. Among our students, there were theater workers, a restorer of antique books, a furniture assembler, and a librarian. Almost half of the course's attendees worked as specialists, and every fifth was a director or business owner.

37% of respondents indicated the war as the primary cause for retraining. Additionally, a quarter of the respondents wanted to change their lives, and another 28% had been considering the transition to the IT industry for a long time. After three months, each program participant selected an IT specialty. Frontend (38%) has the highest registration rate, followed by Java (every fifth participant) in the second position.

Denys Grynov, Head of ЕРАМ University Educational Programs, adds: 

We usually train candidates who already know the basics of IT and have an idea of ​​the profession. However, considering the situation in the labor market, we realized that we should give everyone a chance. As it turned out, we adopted the right strategy, and the IT Fundamentals for Ukrainian switchers pilot course sparked interest from across Ukraine and beyond. We've never worked with such a large audience at once — it's basically like a big campus. However, we understood from the reviews that such a project was much needed. It is especially true for people who lost their jobs because of the war.