The speed of innovation on the Ukrainian battlefield means frontline troops may need a new drone design within weeks — but the country’s defense industry faces a critical labor shortage that threatens to derail that pace. Tens of billions of dollars in investments and wartime demand have fueled the creation of thousands of defense 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 Defense Industries. Some companies are tracking down retired specialists and begging them to return to work. The labor shortage is emerging as one of the biggest bottlenecks to expanding Ukrainian weapons production and accelerating innovation, industry insiders say.
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 the sector, the shortage cuts directly into Ukraine’s bet that technology will offset its manpower disadvantage on the battlefield. An April survey of 27 defense technology companies by the CORE Team recruitment agency found that the firms had grown their workforce by more than 50% — 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 CEO Anna Korol, but the industry is growing much faster.
Some specialties — hardware developers, radio-frequency and antenna specialists, chemists needed for explosives manufacturing — are so scarce that recruiters say they effectively know all available candidates. The lack of people is particularly damaging to innovation, several industry representatives said, as weapons become more sophisticated and require more specialized expertise. 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: defense technology vacancies drew just an average of 1.5 to 3.8 applications in July on DOU.ua, a popular technology job board, compared with dozens for civilian software roles.
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