Employment of master’s degree graduates in Kazakhstan: navigating an uncertain labour market

ABSTRACT

This article explores the employment experiences of government scholarship graduates from one master’s degree programme at a flagship university in Kazakhstan. Analysis of interviews with graduates of a master’s degree programme designed in response to a national policy agenda shows that graduates encountered numerous challenges transitioning from university to work despite obtaining a degree from a top Kazakhstani university. The key challenges included limited employment opportunities, hostile attitudes toward younger graduates, difficult working conditions and employers’ misunderstanding of the new master’s programmes. We argue that despite significant government financial investment in education, a weak enabling support system hinders graduates’ career advancement and results in job mismatch and underutilization of skills. We suggest that policymakers need to shift debates on human capital development and graduate employability from supply-side factors to a more comprehensive model in which graduate employment is supported through the collaboration of the higher education system, industry, policymakers and graduates themselves.

KEYWORDS:

• graduate employment
• international education
• master’s degree
• labour market
• higher education
• Kazakhstan

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on previous drafts of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Bureau of National Statistics, https://stat.gov.kz/ (accessed on 5 November 2021).

2 For more details, see https://www.bolashak.gov.kz/en/o-stipendii/istoriya-razvitiya.html/.

3 Since the time of the interviews, teachers’ salaries were increased at least three times between 2020 and 2022. Most recently, in January 2022, their salaries in schools, kindergartens and technical colleges were increased by 25%; https://24.kz/ru/news/obrazovanie-i-nauka/item/521651-eshche-na-25-povysili-zarplatu-pedagogov-i-vospitatelej/.