Across Europe, skills shortages are emerging as a key challenge. The Council of the European Union says this is driven by demographic change, demand for new skillsets, and poor working conditions in some sectors.
Adding to that, a recent report highlighted that around 42% of Europeans lack basic digital skills, including 37% of those in the workforce.
The rapid advancement of AI is adding more pressure. While AI offers the EU a shot in the arm to strengthen the bloc’s innovation and competitiveness, there is still a gap between the skills required, and the skills available.
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In the Netherlands, new analysis from De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) has found that the growth of the labour force will decline sharply in the coming decades. It says that in the Dutch labour force, there are more vacancies than those unemployed, and that this trend is set to continue.
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Germany is also experiencing a similar fate, with Indeed’s Jobs & Hiring Trends Report for 2025 finding that demand for labour continues to cool, particularly among professional groups with top salaries. The report also found that in the medium term, Germany is heading for a shortage of skilled workers.
In France, Indeed says the picture is broadly similar. “In 2025, wage and purchasing power gains are expected to remain limited while the French unemployment rate will remain close to its current levels,” it notes in its report.
The unemployment rate in France is hovering around 7.4% thanks to a mismatch between supply and demand for workers, in part fuelled by the skills deficit.
On a macro level, these sluggish European labour markets aren’t a great sign, and it is clear that there is much work needed to be done to fix the wider issues around skills gaps. But on a micro, or personal level, software engineers and tech professionals have a lot of scope.
Top skills and programming languages
If you have the right skills, particularly around artificial intelligence and software development, then opportunity knocks.
Stack Overflow’s most recent developer survey found that the most popular programming roles are for full-stack, back-end, and front-end developers. These were followed by desktop or enterprise developers, and mobile and embedded applications. For its community of developers, JavaScript retained its long running spot in first place followed by SQ, HTML/CSS, Python, and TypeScript.
On the other hand, GitHub’s recent Octoverse report found that on its platform, JavaScript has been knocked off its previous perch by Python. This is a language with many uses, notably in the in-demand fields of data science and machine learning, thanks to its simplicity and extensive libraries.
GitHub says this is, “the first large-scale change we’ve seen in the top two languages since 2019—and it speaks to the rise in Python that’s accompanied the generative AI boom we’ve seen over the past two years.”
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The rise of cloud computing, IoT, and AR/VR technologies has also created demand for languages that can efficiently handle these environments. Think Kotlin, which is gaining traction as the preferred language for Android development. Go (Golang) is popular for building scalable network servers and concurrent systems due to its performance and simplicity.
Older languages are seeing a resurgence too. According to data from Developer Nation, Java, for example, gained over eight million new developers from 2021 to 2023. It may be more than 20 years old, but its recent rise in popularity is due to its use and versatility across cloud and IoT.
C++ remains popular according to the TIOBE Index, where it is currently in second position. This is attributed to its performance and scalability, particularly in domains like embedded systems, game development, and financial trading software.
However, not everyone is happy with C++, notably the US government, which issued a report this year urging programmers to move to memory-safe programming languages. This has led Rust’s user base to triple recently. The memory safe language is particularly appealing for systems programming due to its focus on safety and performance, and as a result it can offer a strong alternative to C++.
As the big programming languages battle it out for supremacy, there are always the underdogs waiting in the wings. In its 2024 report, GitHub put a spotlight on the fastest-growing languages. These ones-to-watch include Go, HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language), Kotlin, Dart, Trust, Luna, TSQL, and Blade.
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