Abstract
Industrialisation is considered as main engine of growth in economic development of the most emerging markets. This is especially true for Central Asian transitional countries as Kazakhstan, which obtained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. For enhancing country’s competitiveness potential, Kazakhstan National Program for 2010-2014 aimed to accelerate industrial-innovative development of the country. While many papers published about the importance of industrialization activities in Kazakhstan, few have focused on examining the current capacity of labor market to meet the industry demand. Main aim of this paper was to investigate if current manpower is adequate to maintain the planned rate of growth in the country. Higher level of economic production led to higher demand of engineering labor force. High demand with low frequency supply created an imbalance in the labor market that resulted what we see as shortage of technically skilled labor. Low frequency of supply is influenced by such factors as high engineers’ outflow rate, low students enrolment and graduation rates, and lack of practical skills of the graduates hired. An erratum to this article has been published as https://doi.org/10.5195/emaj.2017.132.