Germany's IT skills gap has halved. Hiring is still hard

The shortage of IT specialists in Germany has nearly halved since 2023, but almost every company with IT positions still has trouble filling them. Both can be true because the national gap appears to have fallen with demand, while firms still report skills and language obstacles on each open role.

How big is the gap now?

In its study of September 2026, Bitkom counts 79,000 missing IT specialists in Germany. The same press release says the number of unfilled IT positions was 109,000 in 2025 and 149,000 in 2023. Bitkom's headline is that the shortage has halved in three years. By its own comparison the numbers support that: 79,000 is 53% of 149,000.

Bitkom is the German digital industry association, so the figure comes from a trade body with an interest in the topic. The method is stated, though. Bitkom Research telephoned two representative samples of 853 and 602 companies with at least three employees in calendar weeks 18 to 25 of 2026, and the press release does not say which sample produced which figure.

A second source points the same way. In its analysis for 2025, published on 2 September 2026, the Federal Employment Agency lists 157 occupational groups with a skills shortage, six fewer than the year before. For 2025 the agency found no shortage in software development, unlike the year before. In June 2025 the agency's report on ICT occupations still said that bottlenecks in filling software development jobs, mainly at expert level, had existed for years, and that they had eased slightly.

Why did the gap shrink?

We read the fall mainly as a drop in demand. Bitkom's release gives no reason for the decline, so this is our reading of the other sources, not Bitkom's statement.

The Federal Employment Agency's ICT report of June 2025, covering 2024, counted an average of 16,000 job offers in 2024, 24% fewer than in 2023, though it still calls demand high. It also counted nearly 43,000 unemployed people looking for ICT work, up 30%, and an unemployment rate of 3.7% in these occupations, the highest in recent years. More people looking and fewer jobs open makes a smaller gap without anyone having trained more developers.

The wider economy shows the same movement. The KfW-ifo skilled-worker barometer of June 2026 found that 21% of German companies were held back by a lack of skilled workers at the start of the second quarter, a share that has more than halved in three years. Its author calls such a fall normal in economic downturns, and notes that the shortage is still high against the long-term average. For IT service providers, ifo reported in August 2025 that the situation was gradually easing, with the share down to 21.3%. Two years earlier it stood at around 50%. The release does not define that share for IT, but it reports the overall economy by the share of companies getting too few qualified workers.

The IW Köln MINT spring report of May 2026 fits too. It puts the gap across all MINT occupations (maths, IT, science and technology) at 133,900 in March 2026, which is 15.7% below March 2025. The report calls the figure a lower bound, it covers more than IT, and employer and industry bodies commissioned it, so we use it only as a direction.

Bitkom adds one more factor, without tying it to the decline. Some 42% of companies with IT positions already use AI in their IT work, and of those, 10% have cut some IT jobs because of it. No company reported increased cuts. AI is part of the picture for some firms, but the survey gives no basis for calling it the main reason for the fall.

Why is hiring still hard?

A smaller national gap says little about whether one firm can fill one role. Bitkom's figures on individual hiring show the other side: 97% of companies with IT positions have difficulty filling them, and 31% receive practically no applications for their open IT positions.

Bitkom also lists the obstacles, without giving a base for each percentage. Missing German language skills are named by 47%, and insufficient professional qualification by 43%. Applicants who lack knowledge of the latest technologies account for 33%, and missing soft skills for 32%.

The German language figure stands out. It means that a candidate who can do the work may still not be hireable by a team that works in German. Bitkom's release gives no figure for English or other foreign languages, so we cannot say how many companies would accept them.

The Federal Employment Agency and Bitkom can both be right. The agency classifies whole occupations as shortage or not, whereas Bitkom asks firms about their own open positions. An occupation can come off the national shortage list while a team that needs a senior engineer with a specific stack, working in German, still struggles to fill that one role. The IW report also cites a study for the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (Zika and others, 2025), which expects supply shortages in IT occupations in the medium term because of demographic change.

What should a team planning for 2027 do?

This section is our addition. It turns the sources into questions for a plan, and it does not claim to be a forecast.

The first task is to name the roles you cannot leave empty. Your plan depends on three or four of them, and the national gap does not say whether you can fill them, so check how long each has been open. Then test the language requirement. Bitkom lists missing German as an obstacle, at 47%, so ask whether each role needs it, because if a role could work in English, the pool of candidates changes.

Qualification and stack deserve separate treatment. Bitkom lists insufficient qualification at 43% and missing knowledge of the latest technologies at 33%, so ask whether a candidate who is strong in the fundamentals could learn the stack on the job. A role that demands both at once is likely to stay open longer. Plan, too, for thin response to advertisements: 31% of companies get practically no applications for their open IT positions, and Bitkom reports that 18% of companies seek external IT specialists and 6% recruit more from abroad.

Finally, watch the demand side. If our reading is right and the gap fell with demand, a recovery in vacancies would push it back up.

If part of that plan is an external team, we describe how we work and what dedicated teams cover on our site.

What we could not confirm

Every Bitkom figure above comes from its press release and study page, and we did not check each one against the full study report. We did not find a source that splits the fall in the gap between lower demand and higher supply, so that split is our reading.

Eurostat and Destatis did not give us a usable IT-specific figure for 2026. Bitkom's release has no figure on how many firms accept English as a working language.