Smaller stations in large cities and stations in small cities rarely have more than fifteen employees, who tend to have more than one title, or a vague job description. Some radio stations get by on as few as four or five employees, though more successful companies employ fifteen to twenty. In Almaty, most TV and radio journalists have an education either in journalism or the humanities, and technical staffs, editors and managers also usually have education relevant to their fields. Journalism students tend to stay in Almaty. Large regional stations rarely have more than one or two employees with a journalism education, though many have degrees in the humanities.
Many smaller stations have no employees with a journalism background.
Under the Soviet education system, the journalism department at the Kazakhstan State University was divided by language of instruction. Research was generally conducted in Russian, all the good jobs required Russian, and degrees from the Russian-language section were competitive and prestigious. The Kazakh-language section was generally filled by students who were not accepted to the Russian department. While this bias has changed to some degree in the last seven years, and new private schools are beginning to teach journalism in Kazakh, there is still a great shortage of practicing Kazakh-language journalists. In the regions the shortage is even more acute.