Mentorship in IT: Why a Business Leader Keeps Teaching
Mentorship is part of Maxim Bolotov’s life mission, he tells Loran Jacobs, who asks why a busy business leader keeps teaching young talent.
In a podcast after Southern Innovations Forum 2025, AI industry leader Loran Jacobs discussed IT education with Maxim Bolotov, President of the BRAINHORN Association of Digital Solutions Developers and one of the creators of the Rostov Region IT Education Foundation. The conversation covers what drives a business leader to teach, what a mentor receives in return, and how companies can ease the junior bottleneck.
Mentorship as a Life Mission
For Maxim, mentorship grows out of a wider mission: the development of IT in the country. That mission links a successful company, the people who grow inside it, and a region where they can build careers and still feel part of the wider IT community. It is also where the Taganrog – IT Capital of Russia brand came from.
What a Mentor Gets in Return
Teaching is not a one-way gift. A mentor keeps learning from the young people who attend lectures, and the contact itself brings real satisfaction. The motivation of newcomers has also changed over the last eight years. IT used to attract people largely for the money, while today a significant share of them come wanting to be useful to their country.
Teacher Internships Against the Junior Bottleneck
Entry-level specialists run into a junior bottleneck. A company has to invest a million rubles or more to turn a graduate into someone who solves practical problems, so hiring junior developers often looks unattractive, and there can be fourteen juniors for every opening. Teacher internships offer one answer. In the program of the Rostov Region IT Education Foundation, now in its third year, university teachers join companies, receive a stipend and then rewrite their curricula. These teachers turn out the most motivated and loyal to their university.
This puts IT education on systematic rails and focuses it on hard skills, since entrepreneurship is a kind of gene and cannot be forced on people. For Loran, it is a new angle on a subject he used to see as secondary.
“Education has always been something on the side, secondary. Like a hobby. And here it turns out to be on systematic rails.” — Loran Jacobs
A Six-to-Seven-Year Bet on AI
Maxim sees a chance to build an artificial intelligence competence center that becomes a breakthrough point for the whole South. Training takes four to five years, so results at an international level will take six or seven.
Watch the full podcast of Loran Jacobs and Maxim Bolotov on YouTube.
