The evolution of modern society has created human of digital age. Our country has also taken this development course, defining it as “Digital Kazakhtan”, new strategy of prosperity and sate programs adopted in 2017. Ministry of information and information of the Republic of Kazakhstan plans implementation period of the program for 2018-2022. Digital development of modern Kazakhstan is envisioned in two directions:  

1. Digitalization of the economy
2. Transition to the digital stage

Every economic sector of the country is making efforts through systematic projects in their professional area to bring and shape the digital industry to the world level. This is well demonstrated by Republican scientific practical conferences, professional forums for specialists, research and social projects, “digital” content of personnel training curriculums, digital technologies in rendering public services. 

The main goal behind developing digital society of the country is to enhance life quality of Kazakhstan citizens through improvement of human capital following the principles of globalization and requirements of modern age. New practices of innovation culture are obviously the mechanisms for future digital industry of Kazakhstan. Such innovative practices of implementing digitalization strategy include Industry 4.0 by production enterprises, modern projects, deploying digital technologies to provide higher quality service in different sectors (public services, healthcare, aviation, education, design, architecture and others).  If digital industry is to be implemented through innovation of those sectors, then the question is “what phenomenon  can trigger such innovations?” The grounds for digital innovation are computer technologies and software of IT companies and opportunities of digital linguistics.  Our society often has misconception, that in the age of technology and innovation, humanities will become irrelevant and not on demand.  In particular, “blind view” is that the age of technology makes language specialists (linguists, language experts) obsolete and linguistics (language studies) continues to live out of digital society.

According to professional opinions and special data, large IT-companies, leading researchers from top Moscow universities providing trainings for IT specialists, famous physicist, futurologist who has predicted evolution and development of digital world, Michio Kaku and other leading experts in the field believe, both science and humanities will play important role in digital age soceity. Humanities, including language specialists will be creating new content of digital society; they will explain and raise public awareness on concepts of new life. It is also historically proven that before transition to any new culture of society, there is user chaos or consumerism. Consequently, new society consumers or digital human being, prior to making their self-identity needs to understand conceptual foundations (moral, philosophical, spiritual, cultural, technological, social and economic) of community and environment they are living in. There will be much work for experts in the field of social humanization.   

In the first two decades XXI-century our country has undergone several transformation periods, focused on economy, industrial prosperity, social reforms and technological development.  In addition to adopting the strategy of Digital Kazakhstan as a new technological trend, course towards the future Modernisation of Kazakhstan’s identity was also put on the agenda. The state programs, Digital Kazakhstan and Modernisation of Kazakhstan’s identity resemble two wings of the eagle taking our country to the world civilization. On the other hand, as it has mentioned above, only technological and social humanization alongside with education and culture can ensure high quality transformation of our country. 

As the technological component of digital civilization progresses, the education, particularly, training requirements of philologists, their professional skills and practices will improve too. Presently,  Kazakhstan universities are preparing philologists, language-experts in the classical, old way. Their professional skills and degree allows them to work at schools, colleges, with master degree they can do teaching and research at universities. This is the professional career path for philologists working in pedagogics. While, non-teaching philologists can find a job in industrial enterprises, management and research organizations.

Transformation of classical philology and language specialists is influenced  by the factors of fast-changing modern world and new concept of social development. Why are some old professions redundant and not on demand at labor market today? Including philologists, trained in the old classical, way. There is an answer to this important question.

A modern specialist of any field shall have soft skills, a set of personal attributes developed additionally to professional competences. With soft skills classically trained philologists can have more employment and career opportunities on labor market today. Having analyzed job and recruitment sites in Kazakhstan (www.Hh.kz,  www.Nur.kz), we have identified  over twenty new types of jobs for philologists, copywriter-analyst, SMM-copywriter, rewriter, copywriter-content-manager, editor-copywriter, PR department manager, publication analyst, media manager, communication manager, communication marketing positions. Salaries offered for these positions are good, above hundred, hundred and fifty thousand KZT. Main professional skills, required for copywriter are creating a text (writing),  use social media  publications as communication platform between product manufacturers and customers,  promote and raise awareness on company product, advertising, to publish entertaining and creative information content on social media, professional and official sites.

Summing up, we can see that digital society sets new dimension for work skills and professional image of linguists. Digital civilization offers abundant opportunities to language specialists. Unfortunately, universities and colleges still do not hurry to prepare the specialists for the positions offered by labor market (they train classical philologists). We have  studied the experience of universities in Russia, where teaching program on computer linguistics (specialty) has been introduced. There are new courses for philology students, digital humanities, mathematic modelling in philology, corpus linguistics, philology at digital age, digital text creation technologies, algorithms for linguistic problems and so on.

Digital society has fully stepped into its age, turning into the reality of XXI- century and a great advantage in fast changing world. Digital life will modify almost all professions. Today academic strategists have already developed the atlas of future XXI- century   professions, including transformed type of classical philology, called digital linguistics (profession is digital linguist). The linguistic cluster of education in the country shall transform to develop digital professional competencies to meet the requirements of labor market of digital age in the future.  

Therefore, within the framework of Digital Kazakhstan strategy, the principles of trainings for pholilogists shall be aimed at shaping the following professional competencies: 

• Programming linguistics tasks/problems
• Working with linguistic computer technologies
• Methods of compiling digital text
• Automated understanding of the text
• Computer modification of the speaking language
• Automated text processing techniques
• Compiling posts and texts for social media
• Machine translation technologies
• Writing algorithms for text recognition
• Artificial intelligence and human speech; modelling and processing
• Technologies of creating artificial intellignce.

If there is new learning path, developing modern curricula for students of universities and colleges and professional competencies of digital linguistics, then digital transformation processes would also be more efficient. The relation of linguistic cluster with digitalization and areas for integration are very broad and important.

It is clear that the difference between language master of the former society  and the digital human of today will lie in the language and culture of digital society.

Tumenbayev Shingiskhan Berikuly,

State language teacher at Language learning center of Aktobe region