Anna Wilhelmi
February 9th, 2021
One thing people can try is registering at the labor exchange, or you can always look for a new position on your own. But you can also acquire new skills and master a job that’s more in demand. Manshuq spoke with three Kazakhstanis who did exactly that. These are their stories.
Story I. How to consider returning to a career after a long time away.
In the USSR, jobs were allocated by the state, and after graduating Irina was sent to work for three years at a crane-building plant in Ukraine. There, she introduced automatic payroll accounting at the factory using the first Soviet minicomputers (which weren’t actually all that mini). At that time, “computing centers” were just starting to open, and IT specialists like Irina were in high demand throughout the entire country.
When the Soviet Union began to collapse, Irina went back home to Kazakhstan. For a time she worked at Metrostroy, a state engineering firm building Almaty’s subway system, where a computer took up half a room and could only be used for five days a month, maximum. Then she was hired by a private company to write accounting programs for the first personal computers. The IT industry, meanwhile, was growing, and the first software packages went on the market — pirated at first, but later licensed from the Moscow tech giant 1C. Keeping a staff of programmers on the payroll was no longer necessary. Still, Irina was offered to stay on with the company, but as an accountant in another department.
In the Soviet Union, large computing centers had mostly been found at major state ministries, but the country was falling apart, and by that time most of them had already shut down. Knowing that finding a job in her previous line of work would be a challenge, Irina decided to accept the offer. She took retraining courses on her own dime, so that she wouldn’t have to rely on the company, and worked there for several more years.
After being invited to work for a foreign company in the oil sector, and working with their finances for several years, she and a colleague took a correspondence course to get a second degree, so that there wouldn’t be any questions about her official qualifications that might affect her salary. She passed several different international exams to be certified as a practicing accountant.
Irina worked for that oil company in its various offices for more than fifteen years - until last year, when they decided to close the Almaty office. She says that she doesn’t regret changing her qualifications: she was drawn to both jobs, and in each role the tasks were essentially the same: preventing calculation errors, or quickly finding them and making corrections.
