Abstract: It is well-known that the main problem of the modern IT industry is the severe shortage of staff. They teach IT experts at classical universities and technical colleges, in colleges (technical schools), on the paid short-term courses, an idea of the second or additional higher education becomes more and more popular, but the lack of qualified staff doesn’t reduce. Many large IT companies open training-centers where they give additional knowledge or even retrain the staff, found by their HR. Such additional costs essentially increase a firm overhead charge, but often it is the only way to solve the problem. Sometimes it’s necessary only to explain to the new employee existing company standards and accepted technologies, but if it is necessary to learn programming languages and effective algorithms then it is hardly to understand what is the real alma mater of employee: his college or his company.

Labour market “overheat” automatically causes unrestrained growth of salaries. There are problems for employers as a result. The social tax in Russia is high enough – 26,2 % from the salary (in the western countries it does not exceed 15 %, and often it is paid by the worker, instead of the employer).

Rent and communication costs grow every year – or at least don’t fall. Therefore the maintenance of the highly skilled staff costs much to the enterprise. Generally nobody can start work constructively immediately, so it causes additional essential losses for the company.

Every year about 150 thousand IT of experts graduate from high schools in Russia– one of the best values in the world, but the lack of them is still huge. Besides, training level is different in different universities and colleges, especially in small towns. One more problem – high schools practically do not train students in many important skills for the industry, for example, team work, version control, culture of reports, budgeting, methods of quality assurance and so on.

Some colleges begin to work in another erroneous manner – become to be specialized courses of one certain technology, for example, SAP or.NET, forgetting about basic knowledge.

Thus, any IT company should spend rather big amount of money for their staff’s training. In this report we will describe some variants of this activity and will try to compare them from the economic point of view.

Bio: 1971 - graduated from the Mathematics and Mechanics Faculty of Leningrad State University. Received a diploma with honour in the field of Computer Science.

1978 - Ph.D. from Leningrad State University. Thesis: "Synthesis of efficient programs".

1991 - Professorship, habilitation thesis: "Software technology for real-time embedded systems". In the same year 1991 founded and became director of State Enterprise "Tercom".

In year 1996 founded and headed Software Engineering Chair of St. Petersburg State University.

In year 1998 founded and became CEO of the "Lanit-Tercom Inc".

In 2008 "Lanit-Tercom Inc" and Moscow software company "Artezio" merged into AT Software. Andrey N. Terekhov heads Board of Directors and supervises R&D department of the new company.

In 1999 Andrey N. Terekhov was one of founders of software developers association of St.-Petersburg – Fort-Ross. When in 2004 on the base of Fort-Ross the All-Russia association of software developers – RUSSOFT has been created, Andrey N. Terekhov has been selected as its first Chairman of board of directors.

Professor Andrey N. Terekhov has more than 70 scientific publications (including 4 books). He is a member of ACM and IEEE.