IT UKRAINE

IT UKRAINE FROM A TO Z
PART 1: THE UKRAINIAN IT ECOSYSTEM
Vladimir Liulka, CEO of the
BrainBasket Foundation:
"The Ukrainian technical education
system needs to be modernized"
Founded in 2014, the BrainBasket Foundation aims to develop IT education in Ukraine. It is sponsored
and supported by such major IT companies as Ciklum, Intel, Invisible CRM, MacPaw, Microsoft and
Upwork, as well as the Kyiv municipal authorities and the Ministry of Education. In this interview, the
foundation’s CEO Vladimir Liulka shares his vision of the issues and prospects of Ukraine’s technical
education system, and explains the goals of his organization.
– What are the foundation’s short term and long-term goals?
At BrainBasket we think that Ukraine is uniquely positioned to become the world’s “brain basket,” exporting
IT products and services created by local IT professionals. Thus our goal is to make the IT industry a
driving force behind the country’s economy by training over 100,000 new IT specialists by 2020.
The scope of the project is quite broad with a number of initiatives. One of these is School Boost, which
aims at popularizing the IT profession among school students while ensuring that schools have
enough resources to provide high quality IT education. Recently we have agreed with the ministry of
education to host an “Hour of Code” in all Ukrainian schools, using the famous Scratch methodology to
introduce students to an hour of computer programming in a fund and interactive way.
Another project we have launched is our monthly BrainBasket Talks. We invite prominent IT personalities to
share their experience and thoughts on the current and future trends of the IT industry.
But our biggest initiatives are Coding for the Future, which has already started, and Technology Nation,
which we plan to fully launch in the early spring of 2016.
– Why do you need to train 100,000 more IT specialists in a country that seems to have a solid high
technical education system?
Firstly, Ukrainian technical education is good for theory but it generally lacks the practical dimension. While
government funding is insufficient, this void is currently being filled by the private educational centers. To
increase the number of competent IT professionals both in theory and practice, the education system needs
to be rebuilt with more modern curriculums and teaching methods as well as more private education
initiatives.
Secondly, by 2020 we expect to have a shortage of 900,000 developers in Europe, and of five million in the
world. Thus, we would like Ukraine to become a country not only with one of the largest technology forces
in the world, but also with one of the highest quality. That would help Ukraine attract new investments and
hit the IT export target of $10 billlion by 2020; up from some $2.5 billion per year currently.
– Tell us a bit about your projects.
Coding For the Future is a project aimed at providing refugees from Eastern Ukraine with the coding skills
they need to retrain themselves for the IT profession. We encourage every refugee or ATO participant
to join us and study absolutely free of charge. With BrainBasket we are demonstrating that the best way to
help these people is to give them the opportunity to enter a new and promising profession and thus
open the gates to a successful life. The plan is to teach such popular programming languages such as java,
php, c# and javascript.
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