A year of EURES vacancy data shows skilled trades, machinery workers, drivers and technicians dominating recruitment, while Europe’s digital and care shortages continue to deepen.

Europe’s labour market is telling a less cinematic story than the debate over artificial intelligence.

Employers still need software developers, cybersecurity specialists and AI engineers. They need even more people who can operate machines, work with metal, drive vehicles, maintain technical systems and keep offices functioning.

New analysis from BestBrokers examined vacancy advertisements carried by the European Employment Services, or EURES, between April 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026. It counted more than 10 million advertised positions across the period. The largest occupational category was “technical labourers,” with 731,953 vacancies—almost twice the 375,070 advertisements for information and communications technology professionals.

“Europe’s employers are still searching most urgently for the people who keep the lights on, factories running and infrastructure standing,” said Alan Goldberg, lead data analyst at BestBrokers.

The jobs Europe is trying to fill

The ten largest occupational groups in the BestBrokers analysis were:

The first five groups alone account for 3,000,881 advertisements. Four are directly connected to the movement, manufacture, operation or maintenance of physical goods and systems. The fifth—office associate professionals—is one of the occupational families frequently assumed to be in the immediate path of generative AI.

Europe has simultaneous demand for industrial workers, technical specialists, service workers and administrative staff. AI may be changing the tasks performed inside many of these jobs faster than it is eliminating the jobs themselves.

Industrial weakness can coexist with worker shortages

Europe’s demand for industrial labour looks especially striking against its weak production numbers. In May 2026, industrial output was 1.2% lower than a year earlier in the euro area and 0.3% lower across the EU. Yet employers in the continent’s industrial core continued advertising heavily for technical workers.

Germany produced 239,039 of the technical-labourer vacancies identified by BestBrokers, followed by France with 153,488 and Austria with 34,881. Czechia and Romania added another 13,381. Together, those five countries accounted for roughly 60% of all advertisements in the category.

Weak output and persistent recruitment demand are compatible. Companies hire to replace retiring workers and people who leave, to obtain skills missing from their existing workforce, and to prepare for new production requirements. A factory can reduce output while still struggling to find a qualified technician. Automation can also increase demand for workers able to install, supervise and repair more sophisticated machinery.

Germany illustrates the distinction between employment and hiring particularly well. BestBrokers found that the country had 32,000 fewer employed people in the first quarter of 2026 than a year earlier while its employers advertised more than 2.4 million positions through EURES during the 12-month study period. Employment is a snapshot of how many people have jobs; cumulative advertisements measure recruitment activity and turnover across an entire year.

Europe’s labour market is cooling, not collapsing

The wider European data shows a labour market that remains tight while easing from the post-pandemic hiring surge.

The EU employment rate for people aged 20 to 64 reached 76.3% in the first quarter of 2026, while labour-market slack—the unemployed plus other people with an unmet need for work—fell to 10.9%. Employment was still 0.5% higher than a year earlier.

Vacancies, however, have been gradually declining. The EU job-vacancy rate was 2.1% in the first quarter, down from 2.2% a year earlier. Vacancy rates fell year over year in 16 EU countries, remained stable in eight and increased in only three.

The pressure is also sharply uneven. The Netherlands had the EU’s highest vacancy rate at 4.0%, followed by Belgium at 3.4%, Malta at 3.3% and Austria at 3.1%. Romania’s rate was only 0.6%, with Poland at 0.8% and Bulgaria, Spain and Slovakia at 0.9%.

This strengthens one part of the BestBrokers finding: the Netherlands’ 2.83 million EURES advertisements are connected to a genuinely tight national labour market. It also shows why absolute vacancy totals cannot tell the whole story. The same number of postings has a very different economic meaning in Germany, Malta and Cyprus.

Europe has a matching problem as well as a worker problem

The most important trend may be geographic mismatch. The European Labour Authority’s 2025 report on shortages and surpluses recorded 2,617 occupation-level shortages across participating countries alongside 2,177 surpluses. Many occupations appear in shortage in one country and surplus in another.

Around 53 million people work in occupations classified as having widespread shortages or surpluses. The number of occupations experiencing shortages across most of Europe has declined, but the severity of the remaining shortages has increased. The pressure is becoming more concentrated and more structural.

The pattern also points toward a training problem. Shortages are common in medium-skilled occupations requiring specific vocational qualifications. These are difficult to solve through a generic university expansion or a short online course. Europe needs more apprenticeships, credential recognition, employer training and pathways that allow workers to transfer their skills across borders.

The country results show the different forms this pressure takes. Health and care professionals were the leading vacancy group in Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and Liechtenstein. Personal-service workers ranked first in Spain, Portugal, Malta, Denmark, Slovakia, Hungary and Iceland. Teaching professionals led in Poland, Bulgaria and Estonia.

The European Labour Authority identifies demographic change, limited mobility, skills mismatch and job quality as major causes. That final factor matters. Some labour shortages reflect an insufficient number of qualified people. Others persist because the pay, scheduling, security or working conditions are not attractive enough to retain them.

Digital hiring remains a major shortage of its own

The EURES ranking doesn’t suggest that Europe has solved its technology-talent problem. Some 375,070 ICT positions in a single year still represent substantial demand, and Finland recorded ICT as its largest occupational vacancy group.

A July 2026 Eurofound study of the EU digital workforce found that IT employment has been growing by 7% to 8% annually, compared with just over 1% for employment overall. Among firms with open IT positions, 57% reported difficulty filling them. The hardest roles to staff included senior positions and specializations in cybersecurity, cloud computing and AI.

At its current rate of growth, the EU is expected to miss its target of 20 million ICT specialists by 2030 by about five million workers.

Europe faces two connected talent shortages. It needs the people who develop and secure the digital layer, and it needs the workers who build, operate and maintain the physical layer beneath it. The second category is larger in the EURES advertising data; the first remains essential to Europe’s productivity, security and technological sovereignty.

The office numbers add another complication. The two separately classified office groups in the BestBrokers data account for roughly 1.09 million advertisements. That shows exposure to automation, deployment of automation and actual reductions in hiring occur on different timelines. Vacancy data captures employer behaviour now, not the eventual technical ceiling of the software.

Europe is turning to migration, but matching still matters

Europe’s domestic workforce cannot supply every missing worker. An analysis from the European Central Bank found that non-EU citizens have contributed disproportionately to employment growth in sectors with high vacancy rates, including information and communications services, construction, and accommodation and food services.

The EU Talent Pool entered into force in June 2026 as the bloc’s first common platform for connecting employers with jobseekers outside Europe. The European Commission expects the system to become fully operational by the end of 2027.

Recruitment alone will not resolve the mismatch. The European Labour Authority finds that migrants and mobile workers are often overqualified for the jobs they hold or employed in occupations that already have a surplus. Faster recognition of qualifications, language support and better cross-border information will determine whether migration fills genuine gaps or simply adds skilled people to the wrong part of the labour market.

A Data Caveat

Online advertising has its own biases. Eurostat warns that some teaching and nursing occupations, agricultural labourers and some construction trades can be underrepresented in online job-ad data, while IT roles may be overrepresented. The exceptionally low EURES totals reported for forestry, fishery and subsistence farming should therefore be read as a feature of the recruitment channel, not evidence that European agriculture needs almost nobody.

The rankings are best understood as a powerful directional signal. That signal aligns with the European Labour Authority’s broader shortage research: Europe’s most persistent gaps are concentrated in trades, machine operations, professional services and care, with many of the hardest shortages requiring specific mid-level skills.

The old and new economies are becoming one system. Data centres require electricians and cooling technicians. Automated factories require machinery specialists. Digital commerce still depends on transport, warehousing and sales. Ageing populations require care that software can support but cannot independently provide.

Europe’s future of work is being written in code, wiring diagrams, maintenance logs, route schedules and care plans at the same time.