“Mind the Closing Doors”: Employers’ (Un)Willingness to Consider Candidates with IT Online Training
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14515/monitoring.2025.6.2803Keywords:
IT specialists, online courses, age of applicants, willingness of employers, employment, quasi-experiment, labor marketAbstract
Despite the high demand for IT specialists and online courses for their training, little is known about how a candidate's basic education and age affect their employment. This study addressed two questions: 1) What is the employers' willingness to hire graduates of online courses for junior positions, and 2) Whether this willingness differs for candidates of different ages. These questions are examined within a theoretical framework combining signaling theory and labor market discrimination theory. Specifically, a formal diploma and online certificates are analyzed as signals of different strengths regarding a candidate's competence, while age and type of education are considered potential grounds for "taste-based" or statistical discrimination under incomplete information. Using a quasi-experiment, we compared the employment prospects in the IT sector for two hypothetical candidates without a basic technical education who completed online programming courses but belonged to different age groups. The results revealed low demand for graduates of online courses without a technical background and a strong bias in favor of younger candidates.
Acknowledgements. The study was implemented in the framework of the Basic Research Program at HSE University.
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