Shortage of engineers becomes a bottleneck for Ukraine’s defence tech

• Ukraine's defence tech industry faces a severe engineer shortage, limiting the ability to quickly respond to frontline innovation needs.
• The labour gap is worsened by population decline, war impacts, and a lack of qualified candidates despite rapid workforce growth.
• Companies train inexperienced workers and boost salaries, but specialised skills remain scarce, threatening long-term defence innovation and production scaling.

KYIV – The speed of innovation on the Ukrainian battlefield means frontline troops may need a new drone design within weeks – but the country’s defence industry faces a critical labour shortage that threatens to derail that pace.

Tens of billions of dollars in investments and wartime demand have fuelled the creation of thousands of defence companies in Ukraine, but the supply of workers has failed to keep up.

Yurii Faraponov, chief operating officer of BlueBird Tech, said his company can’t respond to some frontline requests because he doesn’t have enough engineers.

Another company recently poached a production manager by offering him three times his previous salary, along with paid housing, said Sergii Vysotskyi, vice-president of the National Association of Ukrainian Defence Industries.

Some companies are tracking down retired specialists and begging them to return to work.

The labour shortage is emerging as one of the biggest bottlenecks to expanding Ukrainian weapons production and accelerating innovation, industry insiders say.

“The market is experiencing something akin to internal cannibalism: we keep reaching out to the same people over and over and using every tool” to recruit them, said Marta Khrypiak, defence tech lead at the Lobby X recruitment agency.

Ukraine’s working-age population had been shrinking for decades and fell even more sharply after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, as millions fled abroad and others joined the military. 

In defence tech, the shortage cuts directly into Ukraine’s bet that technology will offset its manpower disadvantage on the battlefield.

An April survey of 27 defence tech companies by the CORE Team recruitment agency found that the firms had grown their workforce by more than 50 per cent – collectively hiring thousands of people – in one year.

All expected to expand further, but said there was a lack of qualified candidates.

Even before the war, technical and vocational education had became less popular and many specialists left for better-paid work abroad, Vysotskyi said. 

The number of professionals is rising as people retrain, said CORE Team Chief Executive Officer Anna Korol, but the industry is growing much faster.

Some specialities – hardware developers, radio-frequency and antenna specialists, chemists needed for explosives manufacturing – are so scarce that recruiters say they effectively know all available candidates. 

“You can’t recruit many people through job postings anymore – everyone has already been snapped up,” Vysotskyi said. 

The lack of people is particularly damaging to innovation, several industry representatives said, as weapons become more sophisticated and require more specialised expertise. 

Scaling suffers as well.

Even when a company can find enough welders and assemblers, for instance, there are too few production managers and process engineers to oversee and expand manufacturing lines, Vysotskyi said. 

When a company needs to deliver on a tight deadline, job titles can become irrelevant: accountants and human resources workers may be pulled in to help assemble drones or load shipments, Khrypiak said.

There is no work-life balance, she added, with long hours at production sites targeted by Russian strikes. 

That leads to fewer applicants: defence tech vacancies drew just an average of 1.5 to 3.8 applications in July on DOU.ua, a popular tech job board, compared with dozens for civilian software roles.

But workers in the industry care that their ultimate customer is a soldier, Faraponov said.

“When you compare your pace of work with the pace of the military, you don’t really feel like complaining,” he added. 

The sense of purpose often drives people to the industry, according to recruiters, but there are tangible perks too. 

Almost nine in 10 companies had raised salaries over the previous year, according to the CORE Team survey, to stay competitive.

Companies are aggressively headhunting specialists at home and trying to return others from overseas, industry insiders say.

People with rare expertise sometimes work for multiple manufacturers at once.

Military-aged men at defence companies also get an exemption from the draft. 

And career growth opportunities are unparalleled for Ukraine, recruiters say.

Faraponov, for instance, worked in marketing before joining BlueBird Tech in 2024 to assemble drones in a garage-like workshop.

Within two years, as the company expanded, Faraponov led production at a factory and then became the company’s chief operating officer.

Such advancement is not uncommon. 

Raising a new generation of engineers

Companies, unable to find experienced employees, increasingly take people with no tech background, then train them. 

Assembly workers can be trained in weeks, said Maryna Shvydchenko, human resources director at Vyriy Drone.

The company runs an academy to prepare people with no relevant experience for production jobs, then grows many of them into managers and team leaders. 

Training research and development employees takes longer, which puts a premium on university-educated specialists.

Since 2022, Ukrainian universities have been offering or reviving defence-related degree programmes.

All 32 first graduates of one such programme – master’s in unmanned aerial vehicles at the Kyiv School of Economics – were immediately snapped up by the UAV industry, according to Ivan Ostroumov, the programme’s head.  

Although defence-tech-adjacent majors saw an uptick in enrolment across universities since the full-scale invasion in 2022, the gains have not kept pace with the industry’s growing demand.

In 2025, according to government data, only 671 students nationwide started bachelor’s degrees in aerospace engineering, which encompasses drone and missile manufacturing, and 464 chose chemical engineering, badly needed for explosives manufacturing. 

“Obviously, it’s never too late because Russia will not disappear from the agenda as our enemy,” Vysotskyi said.

“As long as that existential threat exists, we will always need a very strong, technologically advanced defence industry, which requires a skilled workforce.” BLOOMBERG