Demand for a few, highly advanced technology skills is surging while Europe’s wider IT employment market softens. How to square the circle?
In March 2026 Arthur Mensch, who runs Mistral AI, raised 830 million US dollars to build data centres near Paris and in Sweden. A month before, he had bought Koyeb, a small Paris firm, more for its engineers than its software, and by spring was advertising for machine-learning engineers cleared to work inside French sovereign institutions, paying the several hundred thousand dollars a year such people now fetch. Saadia Zahidi had seen it coming. The World Economic Forum managing director’s Future of Jobs report, drawn in January 2025 from more than 1,000 employers, ranked big-data and machine-learning specialists as the fastest-growing roles of the decade, with fintech engineers just behind.
Zahidi had also warned that 39 per cent of the skills workers held would be remade or made obsolete by 2030. Carol Stubbings priced the other side of that ledger. In June 2025 the PwC commercial chief launched the firm’s AI Jobs Barometer, built from close to a billion job advertisements, which found that workers with AI skills earned a wage premium of 56 per cent over colleagues doing the same job without them, more than double the gap of a year before. Ravio, a London pay-benchmarking firm, reached a soberer version of the same finding that November, putting a mid-level British AI engineer about 12 per cent above an ordinary software developer, enough to lift a typical 70,000-pound salary to 78,400 pounds.
The unemployed and the unfillable
Ralf Wintergerst supplied the German counterpoint in August 2025. The Bitkom president’s survey of more than 800 companies counted 109,000 unfilled IT posts, down from a record 149,000 two years earlier but still the fourth-highest tally since the count began in 2009, and found the average vacancy took 7.7 months to fill. Andrea Nahles muddied the picture three months later. The Federal Employment Agency chief reported 57,665 jobless IT specialists by the end of September, a quarter more than a year before, even as Wintergerst’s vacancies went begging; Nahles had already warned that experienced workers were leaving the labour market faster than young ones arrived. Even so, her own count put about 1.52 million people in IT and communications jobs, 4 per cent more than a year before. The jobs going unfilled wanted advanced skills; the people on her register had the ordinary kind.
James Lyne and Rob T. Lee narrowed the demand to its sharpest point. At the RSA conference in April 2026 the two SANS Institute researchers presented a workforce survey in which the share of employers chasing brand-new specialist roles had leapt from 23 to 53 per cent in a year. ISC2, a certification body, had already counted a worldwide shortfall of 4.8 million security staff. Wintergerst put the German share of that gap at more than 104,000 unfilled posts. Claudia Plattner gave the European version a face: the head of Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security called the gap structural in her November situation report and reminded readers that attackers pick the softest target first.
The Bundestag sharpened that demand at the close of 2025, writing the European Union’s NIS2 cybersecurity directive into German law and pushing mandatory risk controls onto more than 30,000 companies across 18 sectors, each of which now needed at least one security officer it did not have. Deutsche Telekom and Siemens had seen this coming and built their own cyber academies, retraining career-changers as analysts in nine months once hiring from outside had stopped working.
Henna Virkkunen and Roxana Mînzatu handed out the bloc’s Digital Skills Awards in November 2025. The European commissioners for technology and for skills did so against an awkward target. Their Digital Decade programme wants 20 million ICT specialists at work by 2030; in 2024 the Union had 10.3 million, one in twenty of the workforce and four-fifths of them men, and on present trends will reach perhaps 12 million. Ursula von der Leyen had asked Virkkunen months earlier to review the whole programme during 2026.
Christian Klein had drawn the same lesson two years earlier. In January 2024 the SAP chief restructured 8,000 jobs, funded most of the change through reskilling rather than redundancy, and ended the year with the headcount he had started it with. The company employed as many people as before. It needed different ones.
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