Sauranbayev Yeraly Bolatovich

At the moment, the construction industry is experiencing a certain decline. Of course, the stress is still temporary in nature, however, whether this stress becomes chronic, systemic or only temporary depends on the actions of the government. Now the most important problem in the construction industry is the disruption of supply chains: imports, supplies, labor. I especially want to note the problem of human resources, there are not enough specialists. The market is also narrowing.

However, if you look at the industry in retrospect 5-10 years, we have seen a big leap for the better.

The construction industry in Kazakhstan is an integral and significant part of the economy, which at the moment has not yet realized its full potential.

As for the level of professionalism in the domestic construction industry, a high level of competence is observed in the construction of housing and industrial buildings. Good professionals are employed in the construction of load-bearing structures, in engineering work, electrical and plumbing work. At the same time, new technologies are used. Our company, for example, has built the first warm warehouse in the CIS, it is fully automated, only robots are employed, human labor is practically not used.

However, the problem of the lack of qualified personnel still exists. At the level of workers, we have trained personnel, but the quality of training managers is lame, the composition of this echelon of specialists is limited. Our economy is changing rapidly, this is associated with a staff turnover, there are large flows from one region to another, from one industry to another, and every 2-3 years in the construction industry there is either an inflow or an outflow of human resources. For example, now we are seeing a large outflow due to the pandemic, people are stuck in their regions.

In recent years, there has been a shortage of all specialists, either not enough people, or not enough professional training. Moreover, quantitatively there is a lack of low-skilled personnel, and qualitatively, there is a lack of professional managers. Young specialists enter the market. The impression from them is generally good. If there is not enough knowledge, then this deficiency is compensated by the openness of the worldview, thanks to digitalization, the mentality of young people is already different. Now the industry is supported by a mature generation of specialists. The engineering staff is basically a post-Soviet mentality, they are gorgeous craftsmen, but they cannot think in the format of a resource for saving, ecology, and so on. Many professionals lack the entrepreneurial mindset, especially among experienced engineers, and this leads to higher labor costs. In general, in Kazakhstan there is some kind of inferiority complex in relation to new technologies. Everyone interprets the concept of "new technologies" in his own way, many believe that it is necessarily something foreign, robots and so on. For some, this is part of their daily routine. This is probably more of a philosophical question, whether we accept them or not new technologies, it is as a way of our thinking. The people who are responsible for the control, for the implementation of standards, mostly think in the old rules and regulations and negatively perceive new technologies. There are also features of the industry itself. Construction is a fairly conservative sector and innovations come to us last. The attitude towards experiments is still negative, because the quality of our work determines how safe the buildings, objects that we have built for people, for their lives, for their work will be. So innovation is still more in the field of consumer goods. If we talk about the gold standard of the industry, then in the world now 3D printing, and "green" technologies, and robots at construction sites are already used, I am sure that this will also come to us sooner or later.