Наталя Хандусенко Увійти в ІТ 14 August 2025, 15:35

From Frontend to AI: how IT education trends in Ukraine have changed over 20 years

SoftServe Academy analyzed the main technological areas of education of Ukrainians over the past two decades. The Academy has trained over 36,000 specialists, and based on its own educational solutions, it tracked how the popularity of IT courses changed in response to the needs of the labor market.

About the research

SoftServe Academy is an educational unit of SoftServe University, which has been training IT professionals to work on world-class projects since 2005.

The study took into account data on SoftServe Academy graduates over the past 20 years. The Academy's specialists analyzed how the demand for technological areas changed based on students' choice of courses and specializations in different periods (during 2005-2020 and 2021-2025).

What IT training courses were in the top during 2005-2020

Despite the dynamic development of technologies, the period 2005-2020 is the training of personnel for "classic" enterprise IT, that is, the creation, support and modernization of large-scale corporate systems that ensure the operation of large companies and organizations. During this period, the main core was classic web frameworks, monoliths and a large share of testing. At the same time, the last five years have brought cloud platforms, JS full stack and the exponential growth of AI to the forefront.

Frontend (HTML/CSS/JavaScript, jQuery, Angular 1.x) was one of the key areas for starting in IT — almost 20% of SoftServe Academy graduates from 2005-2020 studied in this area.
QC + ATQC (manual testing, automation using Selenium, Java/Python) remained a consistently popular choice for entering the profession – 17% of graduates.
Java and .NET have become the main ones for creating enterprise solutions — about 12 and 8% of graduates, respectively.
Python during this period was used mainly for automation and scripting, even before the popularity of Data Science — 5% of graduates.
DevOps was just beginning to emerge as a separate discipline, with a focus on Jenkins and Ansible — 4% of graduates from this period.

Trends from 2021: new challenges and the growth of new directions

Over time, there has been a noticeable shift in the focus of IT education, with a rapid increase in the popularity of areas related to cloud technologies, full-fledged JavaScript development, big data processing, and artificial intelligence. These shifts reflect the transformation of market demands: from stable enterprise solutions to flexible, scalable, and data-driven approaches.

Frontend/Fullstack JS — HTML/CSS/JS, TypeScript, React/Next.js, Node + SSR, React Native has become the dominant direction for the development of web technologies — 29% of graduates in 2021-2025 completed their studies in these areas.
DevOps/Cloud has seen a fivefold growth with tools like Kubernetes, IaC, GitOps, FinOps — about 18% of graduates.
Python has tripled in popularity, and as the primary language for Data Science and AI, it continues to grow — about 14% of graduates.
Java is still popular — 13% of graduates.
DB & Big Data areas (migration to cloud DWH, Snowflake/BigQuery) have also gained popularity — 7% of graduates.
The AI direction, which became trendy only in 2023, has already prepared some graduates and is demonstrating the fastest growth and demand for educational solutions.

Changes in the IT market do not stop: new roles, tools and technologies appear, transforming the requirements for specialists. In accordance with these challenges, the approach to learning is evolving - from the content of programs to the formats and pace of knowledge acquisition.

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